In Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life, Karen and Barbara Fields argue that “race” is a pseudo-scientific system for explaining invisible forces. For the Fieldses, “race” is inexorably speculative; it is a way of using imaginary science to construct or “craft” the extra-empirical reality of “racial” difference. This special issue of Humanities seeks to explore the intersections between the Fieldses’ concept of racecraft—the ensemble of beliefs and practices that make and remake the social reality of “race”—and the various forms of crafting, pretending, playing, fabulating, extrapolating, cognitively estranging, and world-building in speculative culture. As a super-genre or trans-generic category, the speculative stretches across science fiction, fantasy, and horror while also including practices such as role-playing and fan cultures. If “race” is always already speculatively crafted, what happens when racecraft meets the implausible, magical, fantastic, or weird in speculative culture?
One important limitation of Racecraft is its neglect of the intersections among “race” and other forms of difference. Thus, “Racecraft and Speculative Culture” also seeks to go beyond the Fieldses’ work and explore how gender, sexuality, class, religion, coloniality, and dis/ability are crafted with (and against) “race.”
This call invites contributions that map the portals between “race” in the realm we call the “real world” and the fantasies of “race” we encounter in the kingdoms of speculation.