![]() This is not my area of expertise, but there's a great article on the topic by Houston Baker called "Freedom and Apocalypse: A Thematic Approach to Black Expression." Baker says that denied access to their own ancestral mythology, African-Americans had to make use of Christianity's, but that wasn't exactly readily available either: "The black folk on small farms, on large plantations, and in the cities of America, having effectively been isolated from West African culture, were denied meaningful participation in white culture by proscriptive and dehumanizing laws. This is true of African-American apocalypses as well. ![]() but everyone in the book seems to think they will. There's a weird sort of utopian optimism that underlies the postapocalyptic story, even, say The Walking Dead, where things go round and round and never get resolved. ![]() So many postapocalyptic stories seem bleak, but in the long run cop out on that, probably because of what Claire Curtis says, that "hey provide both the voyeuristic satisfaction of terrible violence and the Robinson Crusoe excitement of starting over again" (6). As a piece of postapocalyptic literature, it's even bleaker than most. Way back in summer 2016, when I taught my class on apocalyptic and postapocalyptic literature, one of the novels I elected to teach was Octavia Butler's Dawn. ![]()
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