Easy Journeys to Other Planets: Black Myths & Visions of Otherworlds

This thesis introduces the author’s notion of Black Myth-Making as a way to understand the ways in which Black people have constructed themselves in the wake of slavery. I trace the legacy of Black Myth-Making through the Flying Africans of Coastal Carolina, Alexander Bedward, Black Herman, Sun Ra, and Drexciya. These figures represent a tradition of myth-makers, unified by a kind of kinship generated through citation and a common theme of flight— escape from their oppressive conditions. In this tradition of Black flight, I identify fugitive epistemologies, reflective of the investment of these communities in the possibilities of supernatural liberation. Drawing on Max Yeshaye Brumberg-Kraus’s theories of queer mythopoeia, I argue that the stories we tell shape the land we inhabit. By telling utopian fiction, one necessarily expands their horizon of possibility. This expanded horizon— a renewed faith in the Alterdestiny— then makes us free to commit ourselves to the labor of altering destiny. As the dominant, hegemonic myths guide us towards crises of energy, water, and debt, it is critical to tell new myths in the process of building other worlds.