Elżbieta Binczycka-Gacek

This article offers an in-depth examination of Randall Kenan’s A Visitation of Spirits, contextualizing its narrative within the frameworks of Queer theory and African American cultural studies. Set against the backdrop of a rural North Carolina community, the novel focuses on the experiences of Horace Cross, a young African American grappling with his homosexuality amidst the constraints of a Christian Fundamentalist society. The analysis explores how the novel navigates themes of race, sexuality, and identity, particularly through Horace’s quest for self-transformation. This study underscores the novel’s intricate exploration of these themes, positing queer transformation as a pivotal element that provides insight into the complexities of identity and community within the African American context. Additionally, the article examines the novel’s integration of popular culture references, revealing their role in bridging the discussions of racial and sexual identity. The aim is to shed light on Kenan’s narrative as a significant contribution to the discourse on intersectionality in literature, highlighting its impact in the broader fields of Black and queer studies.

This article’s objective is to compare different afrofuturistic texts containing references to the Flying Africans myth. I am going to analyse Anthony Joseph’s text The African Origins of UFOs and Nalo Hopkinson’s novel The Salt Roads in the musical funk and ambient context. My main focus is the song Star Child from album The Mothership Connection by the American band Parliament-Funkadelic and an electro-ambient album by the American group Drexciya, entitled The Quest, built around a story about an underwater human race living in the bottom of the Atlantic, born of pregnant women thrown overboard by slave ships.