Rethinking Black Speculative Fiction: The Example of Charles Chesnutt

This essay draws upon recent developments in histories of finance and Black studies to argue for an expanded consideration of late nineteenth-century speculative fiction. In recent decades, speculation has emerged as a foundational methodology, critical framework, and literary genre in African American literary studies and Black studies. Yet, within this body of scholarship, speculative fiction is most often associated with anti-realist modes that imagine alternate futures while speculative reading and research methods double as a critique of our political and disciplinary limits. Through a close reading of Charles Chesnutt’s 1901 novel The Marrow of Tradition, this essay considers how speculation’s late nineteenth-century instruments and logics determine the novel’s political horizons and narrative structure. By attending to the financial workings of late nineteenth-century novels that might seem to strain against the bounds of either genre fiction or speculative research methods, this essay argues that we can begin to see how a work like Chesnutt’s interrogates a particularly postbellum outlook on the future, one in which the terms of financial speculation can only imagine a future that is an intensification of the past.