Ellison, Delany, and the Forgetting of Things Future

Abstract: Analyzing Samuel R. Delany's Dhalgren through the lens of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man , this article argues that amnesia, often read as an aspect of trauma and repression, can also engender a science-fictional "sense of wonder" toward a Black future. Where traditional SF invokes this sublime wonder through what Darko Suvin coined the novum —the technological or otherwise material invention that transforms the world of the text, estranging it from the material moment of its writing—experimental African American SF texts, and these two works in particular, use amnesia to provoke a sense of wonder concerning the discursive formation of identity and one's nonteleological yet never static transformation into new states of being. Building on Jack Halberstam's queering of forgetfulness in The Queer Art of Failure , this article highlights how amnesia in these texts is less a function of the escapism of SF fantasies than it is a necessary cognitive stance demanded by Afrofuturism's critical function.