Isiah Lavender III has written a volume that will prove invaluable to Afrofuturism's newcomers and thought-provoking to Afrofuturism's veterans. Afrofuturism Rising: A Literary Prehistory of the Movement, published by the Ohio State University Press as part of the series New Suns: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Speculative, upgrades the available and wide-ranging scholarly discourse on Afrofuturism. Lavender's book retraces Afrofuturism's origins to American enslavement and investigates three canonical twentieth-century African American novels through a “trifocal Afrofuturism lens” (14). Lavender posits that Afrofuturism – a “narrative practice” and a “historical phenomenon” (2) – can and should be applied retroactively to African American literature published before the late twentieth-century coining of the term. If anyone is well versed to pen such a study, it is Lavender, author of Race in American Science Fiction (2011); editor of Black and Brown Planets: The Politics of Race in Science Fiction (2014) and Dis-orienting Planets: Representations of Asia in Science Fiction (2017); and coeditor of Literary Afrofuturism in the Twenty-First Century (2020).

Lavender's trifocal Afrofuturism lens comprises the hope impulse, networked black consciousness, and transhistorical feedback loop. These terms are important for understanding Lavender's analysis. Lavender defines the hope impulse as black peoples’ desire for a better life, a better future, and freedom (29), and the networked black consciousness as black peoples’ “communal memories and traditions, which link past, present, and future” (7). Lavender maintains that the hope impulse and networked black consciousness create the transhistorical feedback loop which is “where [black people] go outside the bounds of today's systematic narrative of past events related to early white America … inspiring a response to advance the human condition” (7).

Lavender's goal is singular: to re-present and rebrand concepts, contexts, and texts familiar to African American literary scholars using the language of science fiction to demonstrate the necessity, value, and power of understanding these works and historical events as Afrofuturism. Part I, comprising chapters 1, 2, and 3, applies the trifocal Afrofuturism lens to “key figures” (Phillis Wheatley, Olaudah Equiano, Benjamin Banneker, David Walker, and Pauline Hopkins, among others), “historical rebellions” (the Stono Rebellion, the Haitian Revolution, Nat Turner's Rebellion, the German Coast Uprisings, and the Conspiracies of Gabriel Prosser and Denmark Vesey), and “political movements” (17). Part II, comprising chapters 4, 5, and 6, applies the trifocal Afrofuturism lens to three works not considered science fiction or Afrofuturist: Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, Richard Wright's Native Son, and John A. Williams's Captain Blackman. In the Conclusion, Lavender offers a brief meditation of the Afrofuturist visions of Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart (1958) and Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad (2016).

Afrofuturism Rising's utmost value lies in its potential to equip teachers with a blueprint on how they might approach teaching canonical African American literature through the lens of Afrofuturism. Lavender's choice to include texts anthologized – in part or in whole – in The Norton Anthology of African American Literature (1996) (Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, David Walker's Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, Frederick Douglass's 1845 Narrative, Phillis Wheatley's “On Being Brought from Africa to America”) is a shrewd move. This inclusion rebrands these canonical works as exemplars and forebears of Afrofuturism and also validates the study of “underappreciated” contemporary works, like Steven Barnes's 2002 novel Lion's Blood (77).

Afrofuturism Rising is useful beyond its scholarly contribution to Afrofuturism studies. When discussing stifled rebellions, for example, Lavender notes that Gabriel Prosser “suffered a network failure” and Denmark Vesey's “network crashed” (55) to describe how others betrayed their insurrectionist plots. Such language – “recalibrating” (63), “upgrade” (63), “transmitting” (61), “reprograms” (49), “interface” (64), “reboot” (75), “network disconnection” (139) – peppers Lavender's writing. Lavender's commitment to using science fiction language as a rhetorical device to strengthen his argument is a useful model of effective, intentional word choice for those who teach and engage in advanced academic writing.

Afrofuturism Rising sets the stage for future Afrofuturist reading practices beyond literature. I would be interested to see Lavender's trifocal Afrofuturism lens applied to African American film, perhaps Oscar Micheaux's Within Our Gates (1920) or Spike Lee's Malcolm X (1992). Such an application would be a welcome complement to Ebony Elizabeth Thomas's The Dark Fantastic: Race and Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games (2019), where Thomas applies her “dark fantastic cycle” to literature, film, and television. Applying the trifocal Afrofuturism lens to African American film that is not considered science fiction would be a compelling, welcome expansion to Lavender's already robust contribution.