SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY have long been understood as genres in which we can at once critique the existing social order and imagine a better one. In a contemporary world defined by crisis and chaos, the allure of these creative modes has grown even more powerful. And if you look at today’s cultural landscape, you will find it saturated with a turn to the speculative and fantastic, splashed across everything from Marvel’s box office ubiquity to TV dramas like Severance and The Sandman to the novels of N. K. Jemisin.

Taking stock of these cultural shifts as expressed among Black creatives, In the Black Fantastic, a recent exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in London, gathered together the work of 11 Black artists from across the world who are using science fiction and fantasy to interrogate racism and to offer windows into new possibilities for thinking connection, history, and Black being in the world. This shared investment in the speculative represents a growing interest among Black creatives who are pushing back against the restrictions and constructions of “the racialized everyday” — the term show curator Ekow Eshun uses to describe the simultaneous recognition of race as a social construct and lived reality. As an aesthetic mode, the Black Fantastic offers a route through and beyond the racialized everyday into new worlds where dreaming and imagination can produce novel models of being and connecting across the histories and cultures of the African…