“AfroSurrealism presupposes that beyond this visible world, there is an invisible world striving to manifest, and it is our job to uncover it.”

— D. Scott Miller, the “Afrosurreal Manifesto.”

Storytelling is how we uncover what’s been buried, that invisible world striving to manifest. It is with deep gratitude that we present the Strange Horizons AfroSurreal Special Issue. We want to begin by thanking the Strange Horizons team for their belief in this vision, and for providing the platform and trust to bring it to life. Special thanks to the speculative fiction and poetry community for uplifting the call, and to every reader, writer, and artist who continues to make space for the strange, the dreamlike, the in-between.

The AfroSurreal issue was born from a desire to gather work that plays with perception and memory, that bends time and subverts logic, that centers the lived and imagined experiences of Black people in their full, kaleidoscopic complexity. We received submissions from across the diaspora, from worlds haunted by the spectres of colonialism and slavery and shaped by collective resistance, where the veil between the real and the surreal has always been thin. Thank you to everyone who shared their work with us. Reading your stories and poems was a gift, and we hope to see your names echo loudly in issues and books to come.

AfroSurrealism is not just a genre: it’s an inheritance. A praxis. A refusal. It emerges from an artistic lineage that includes the paintings of Wangechi Mutu and Harmonia Rosales, the fiction of Toni Morrison and Kojo Laing, the poetry of Amiri Baraka and M. NourbeSe Philip. It’s in the myths whispered by grandmothers and in the speculative architecture of Black urban futures. AfroSurrealism dares to say: the fantastical is already here. The rupture is not a break from reality, it is reality.

In fiction, our table of contents features three stories that highlight a range of voices, tones, and styles. “Till Earth and Heaven Ring” by K. S. Walker draws on critical fabulation to tell a story of two lovers self-emanacipating, and a hole in one’s chest that whispers freedom. “The Black Refinery” by Nadia Amatullah King invokes sand trolls in an allegory about exploitation, resistance, and what it means to be human in a world that treats certain bodies as expendable resources. Rutendo Chidzodzo’s “Let Sleeping Hyenas Lie” situates us in a land dispute between an indigenous African community and a gentrifying international corporation.

In poetry, language turns fluid to melt, recode, and re-member. NOVA CYPRESS BLACK’s “SET IT OFF (1996) – FANS’ CUT” uses the Golden Shovel form to reimagine the ending of the Black classic film Set it Off.  “parallels” by Praise Osawaru resists linearity, and the past, present, and future collide. Adebe DeRango-Adem’s “luminaries” is a calligram of a light bulb to meditate on Black invention and erasure, and to honor those ancestors and inventors whose light has been dimmed.

In nonfiction, “A Conjuror’s Manifesto: Notes on the Afrosurreal” by Shyheim Williams reflects on the surrealities of Black life, where joy is hard-won, where history distorts the present, and where the very act of imagining otherwise becomes a radical gesture.

This issue is a chorus of Black voices committed to wonder, mystery, myth, and magic. It is a celebration of the speculative traditions that have always existed within our communities. It is also a call to readers, editors, and publishers to broaden their definitions of genre and form, to welcome the nonlinear, the unsettling, the uncanny.

It has been an immense honor to curate and care for this body of work. We hope this issue opens something inside you—an ache, a portal, a question. Black writers are conjurers and cartographers, reshaping the world word by word.

Without further ado, we invite you to step inside.

Warmly,

Yvette Lisa Ndlovu and Shingai Njeri Kagunda

Guest Editors, AfroSurreal Special Issue

Strange Horizons