Adriana Green

This book project analyzes Black radical interventions into US state narratives of outer space travel across literature, visual culture, journalism, and protest efforts from the 1957 launch of Sputnik until the present to argue that US imperialism relies on narrative recourse to the assumed space-faring future to rationalize racial disparity in the present. Grounded in Black feminist theory, archival research, and literary analysis, this book not only challenges the federal government’s use of outer space and the future as pre-owned US territories, but also provides insight into non-possessive grammars of futurity in which the future is not a territory to claim, but a horizon of possibility.