MF! Momentary Futures in Black Studies

Series editor: L.H. Stallings

Committed to the enjoyment of disjointedness and the asynchrony of Black thought experiences, MF! Momentary Futures in Black Studies is a series about funky temporalities, adaptation, and mobility. The series focuses primarily on Black futurity and speculation, capturing the changing rhythms of the discipline of Black studies as it continues to evolve from when the first Black studies department was founded in 1968. The series encourages the submission of manuscripts whose methods and aesthetics allow us to experience Black pleasure, joy, and possibility. Books in the series are transgressive and experimental while also dealing with the conflicts that arise from the intellectual and artistic boundaries of knowledge production; the defense, surveillance, and policing of Black knowledge; and the political and social constraints of normative and respectable existence as well as aspirational citizenship and humanity. The series fosters projects that center decolonization, Black lives and culture, Black solidarities and relationalities with other communities of color, and other topics within and beyond Black studies to challenge the parameters of current theories, advance new ideas about knowledge production, and speculate about a world without fear of sexual intimacy, without racial capitalism, and without finite approaches to the field of Black studies.

Being out of time has been a radical method in Black creative forms.
Being out of place has been a method for Black living.
Being out of time and place has become a method in critical Black thought and aliveness.

The series is inspired by the irreverent voices of Moms Mabley, Gayl Jones, Nalo Hopkinson, Samuel R. Delany, Paul Beatty, Cheryl Clarke, and Toni Cade Bambara. Its intellectual production is informed by trickster tales, neo-slave narratives, experimental art and theater, Afrofuturism, Afro surrealism, satire, and parody. The series understands irreverence and adaptation as methodology. It facilitates creative collaborations and encourages interactive engagement across intersecting fields. With a particular interest in manuscripts clearly conceived, written in accessible language, and of a reasonable length, the series will primarily accept monographs, while being open to the occasional edited collection or creative non-fiction project, as well as works representing genre-blending innovations that disrupt and defy disciplinarity and temporality. All books in the series will be on research subjects within the purview of Black studies that privilege inventive interdisciplinary scholarship and incorporate rigorous research and storytelling.

Series Editor

L.H. Stallings is professor and chair of the Department of African American Studies at Georgetown University. Stallings is the author of The Afterlives of Kathleen Collins: A Black Woman Filmmaker’s Search for New Life; A Dirty South Manifesto: Sexual Resistance and Imagination in The New South; Funk the Erotic: Transaesthetics and Black Sexual Cultures; and Mutha Is Half A Word: Intersections Of Folklore, Vernacular, Myth, And Queerness In Black Female Culture.

Series Advisory Board

Marquis Bey, Northwestern University
Darius Bost, University of Illinois at Chicago
Lyndon K. Gill, University of Texas at Austin
Tiffany Lethabo King, University of Virginia
Xavier Livermon, University of Californica Santa Cruz
Mireille Miller Young, University of Californica Santa Barbara
Sami Schalk, University of Wisconsin-Madison
S.A. Smythe, University of California Los Angeles
Deborah Vargas, Yale University