James J. Donahue lives and works in New York, north ofthe Adirondacks, and just south of the Canadian border. At SUNY Potsdam, he serves as the assistant chair of the Department of English & Communication, and regularly teaches courses in literary theory, Native American Literature, Young Adult Literature, and The Graphic Novel. In his scholarship, James J. Donahue is interested in narrative form, particularly the ways in which authors construct their narratives to engage in social and political commentary. He works primarily at the intersection of narrative theory andidentity studies, with a particular focus on race and representation. James J. Donahue is the author or co-editor of 4 books, including Narrative, Race, and Ethnicity in the United States (Ohio State UP 2017, co-edited with Jennifer Ho and Shaun Morgan) and Contemporary Native Fiction: Toward a Narrative Poetics of Survivance (Routledge 2019). He is currently working on a co-edited collection titled Greater Atlanta: African American Satire since Obama (with Derek C. Maus), and his book Indigenous Comics and Graphic Novels: Studies in Genre is forthcoming from the University Press of Mississippi.
Race, Time, and Narrative in Indigenous and African American Speculative Fiction
Speculative fiction - including but not limited to such genres as science fiction, fantasy, and post-apocalyptic horror - have long been employed as vehicles for social and political commentary. Imagining worlds not unlike our own, authors of such works enlighten audiences on problems in our world that they may take for granted, such as the ubiquity of structural, systemic racism. The history and continued legacy of settler-colonialism and slavery, to give but two prominent examples from America's troubled relationship with Indigenous and African American peoples, respectively, have been the subject of a number of popular and award-winning novels in recent years. In particular, many authors - such as Cherie Dimaline (Métis), David Robertson (Cree), Janelle Monáe (African American), and N.K. Jemisin (African American) - use their fiction to collapse the past and future into what I call a "continuous present," in order simultaneously demonstrate how, even while reaching into the future, the past is never left behind. Both Indigenous Futurism and Afrofuturism embrace both the pain and the empowering potential of the past in order to imagine futures where oppressed peoples not only survive, but thrive.
