Rivers Solomon’s Sorrowland (2021) plays with genre conventions. The novel’s opening invokes the fantastic and the Southern Gothic to unmoor the reader only to unveil the novel’s contemporary setting. The protagonist, a Black, queer, woman named Vern, experiences visions of people and events from the past superimposed upon her current surroundings, and as the novel develops, these visions take on more solid, corporeal form and interact with her. Solomon later makes the science fictional nature of their speculative version of the U.S. South clear, revealing that Vern’s visions stem from a virus she was infected with without consent that was manufactured with DNA from a natural fungus. Boasting an extensive underground mycelial network, this fungus “ate the brains of the dead who had hosted it,” absorbing their memories and “bringing them back to life in the mycelium” (207). 

A novel emblematic of what I term “Queer Afrofuturism,” Solomon’s Afrofuturist project largely revolves around their science-fictionally post-human protagonist and their bio-technological novum in the mycelium. This essay draws from studies in posthumanism, queer studies, and their marriage in queer ecologies, a field which denaturalizes Eurowestern constructs of gender and sexuality by detailing the entanglement between narratives of human exceptionalism and homophobia in colonialist scripts. Espousing anti-anthropocentric ontological models and conceptions of identity rooted in relationality, these theoretical lenses help us understand the political work of Sorrowland’s bio-technology, a science fictional example of human-nature relationality rooted in ecological realities. The novel, however, highlights models of identity, community, and human-nature relationship that far precede these contemporary (and largely white) fields of scholarly investigation, including African and Native American (Lakota) traditions. These cultural practices and onto-epistemological foundations further service Solomon’s queer critique, driving the novel’s queer Afrofuturism.

I argue that the technological novum in Sorrowland operates as a metaphor 

for the machinery of queer Afrofuturism itself. The fulcrum of this machinery can be found in the counter-hegemonic and generative work that occurs in the body—and the intertwining of bodies—and in the formation of communities that help heal the traumas of colonial violence, white hetero-patriarchy, and their normative logics. Textual engagement serves as a cog in this machinery. I likewise offer a queer rendition of Isiah Lavender’s three-pronged model of Afrofuturism, demonstrating the Afrofuturist functions of textual engagement operating in explicitly queer ways, fostering queer kinship and intimacy across time and space. Most importantly, these connections occur between Black people and people of color from other colonized groups in the Americas. Queer Afrofuturism provides a bridge between Afrofuturism and other ethnic futurisms: Grace Dillon’s Indigenous Futurisms, Catherine Ramirez’s Chicanafuturism, and Cathryn Josefina Merla-Watson's Latin@futurism, to name a few. Insodoing, this approach allows us to trouble existing genre models and preconceptions about the literature of - and set in - the American South.