Literary Activism and Afrofuturist Genealogies in Multi-Authored Fiction

This article considers multi-authorship as a mode of literary activism in two recent Afrofuturist texts: The Deep (2019) by Rivers Solomon and music group clipping., and The Memory Librarian and Other Stories of Dirty Computer (2022) by Janelle Monaé and their collaborators. In this article, I expand my discussion of multi-authorship to include both texts’ political and artistic legacies as part of their authorial collectives. In doing so, I posit three central arguments: first, that both texts explore the potential for collaborative literary production as a means of resisting creative authority. Second, that The Deep and The Memory Librarian and Other Stories of Dirty Computer deploy intertextual references to Afrofuturist artistic genealogies and racial justice movements as a form of collective authorship and communal memory. Third, that collaborative storytelling has the potential to contest singular readings both within the narrative and between text and audience. The purpose of examining these texts’ multiple authorship and intertextuality is to position The Deep and The Memory Librarian within wider racial justice movements as forms of literary activism that seek to enact social change through invocations of communal memory and collective engagement.