Offering new ways to grasp the meanings and implications of Black freedom, James B. Haile III invites us to reimagine history and memory, time and space, our identities and ourselves.

An ambitious genre-crossing exploration of Black speculative imagination, The Dark Delight of Being Strange 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, Haile traces how Black speculative fiction responds to enslavement, racism, colonialism, and capitalism to reveal a life beyond social and political alienation. He reenvisions Black technologies of freedom through Henry Box Brown’s famed escape from slavery in a wooden crate, fashions an anticolonial “hollow earth theory” from the works of H. G. Wells and Jules Verne, and considers the octopus and its ability to camouflage itself as a model for Black survival strategies. Haile transports readers to alternative worlds and spaces while remaining squarely rooted in present-day struggles. In so doing, he rethinks historical and contemporary Black experiences as well as figures such as Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, Henry Dumas, and Toni Morrison.

About the Author:
James B. Haile, III is an Afrosurrealist and Afrofuturist writer who is an associate professor of philosophy with a joint appointment in English at the University of Rhode Island. He is the author of The Buck, the Black, and the Existential Hero: Refiguring the Black Male Literary Canon, 1850 to Present (2020).