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Podcast: New Books in African American Studies
Episode: James B. Haile III, "The Dark Delight of Being Strange: Black Stories of Freedom" (Columbia UP, 2024)
Description: An ambitious genre-crossing exploration of Black speculative imagination, The Dark Delight of Being Strange: Black Stories of Freedom (Columbia University Press 2024) combines fiction, historical accounts, and philosophical prose to unveil the extraordinary and the surreal in everyday Black life.In a series of stories and essays, James B. Haile, III, traces how Black speculative fiction responds to enslavement, racism, colonialism, and capitalism and how it reveals a life beyond social and political alienation. He re-envisions Black technologies of freedom through Henry Box Brownâs famed escape from slavery in a wooden crate, fashions an anticolonial âhollow earth theoryâ from the...