Syracuse University’s newest University Professor takes a “Renaissance Man” approach to scholarship. Isiah Lavender III, an expert in the field of 20th-century literature, science fiction and Afrofuturism, says his work is informed by everything from his personal experiences as a child in Buffalo, New York, to 18th- and 19th-century African American poets and writers, to contemporary filmmakers, musicians and artists.
He is internationally known for his significant contributions to the field of Afrofuturism—an artistic and cultural movement that blends science fiction, fantasy, historical fiction and speculative fiction. Afrofuturist works feature Black characters and communities making technical and societal advancements and use futuristic themes and elements of Black history and culture to examine and critique the past, present and future. The term comes from cultural essayist Mark Dery’s 1993 interviews with Black scholars in “Black to the Future,” published in the South Atlantic Quarterly. The contemporary movies “Black Panther” and “Get Out” are Afrofuturist examples, Lavender says. “But there is no set definition. You know it when you see it.”
Isiah Lavender III
Lavender’s work challenges the view of Afrofuturism as a contemporary movement tied to modern technology and science fiction. He says it has existed for centuries in Black literature, as far back as the early 18th-century works of writer Phillis Wheatley Peters and abolitionist Frederick Douglass, whose works contain science-fictional language in their exploration of Black alienation, estrangement and dislocation.
He uses an approach he calls “future past”—expressing the idea of a future event from a past viewpoint—to examine “science fictional Blackness,” a concept that explores how Black identity, culture and history intersect with speculative futures, alternate realities and imaginative technologies.
“Science fiction forecasts, if not anticipates, the potential consequences of such a happening and how we can prevent or survive it by thinking through the ramifications of such a future, derived from the past,” Lavender says. “Science fiction is always in dialogue with the present in which it is written. You can play out these kinds of thought experiments with race, gender, sexuality, religion, ethnicity, technology and so on.”
Lavender has authored several books and numerous articles. His books include the notable “Afrofuturism Rising: The Literary Prehistory of a Movement” (2019), “Literary Afrofuturism in the Twenty-First Century” (co-edited, 2020) and “The Routledge Handbook of CoFuturisms” (co-edited, 2023). His newest book, “Race, Law and Speculative Fictions— Future Pasts,” is due out in June 2026. He also serves as an editor for Extrapolation, an academic journal covering speculative fiction.
While he finishes his new book, Lavender plans to teach a spring semester class on race in science fiction and is working with Will Slocombe of the University of Liverpool on another book, “Survival Mode: Anticipating Social Problems through Science Fiction.” He is also exploring the John A. Williams papers at the Special Collections Research Center at Bird Library. Williams, a Syracuse University graduate, is a former journalist, author and teacher who wrote about his experiences as a Black man in America. Lavender also hopes to create a science fiction working group with the Central New York Humanities Corridor.
As University Professor, Lavender has a tenured appointment in the College of Arts and Sciences and is an affiliate faculty member in the Department of English.
