About

Dr. Susana M. Morris is a professor, author, and scholar known for her work as a Black-Feminist Afrofuturist. Her research and writing focus on cultural biography, feminism, hip-hop culture, and the African diaspora. She has authored works such as 'Positive Obsession: The Life and Times of Octavia E. Butler,' which situates the influential writer within key social and historical contexts, and 'Feminist AF: A Guide to Crushing Girlhood,' co-authored with Brittney Cooper and Chanel Craft Tanner, which combines hip-hop and feminist perspectives to empower women. Morris is also a co-editor of 'The Crunk Feminist Collection,' a compilation of essays that critically explore themes like sexuality, power, patriarchy, and misogyny within Black culture and communities. Her scholarship critically examines how African American and Caribbean women writers challenge respectability politics and envision transgressive kinship systems rooted in community care, accountability, and cultural practices of the African diaspora. Described as a queer Afrofuturist feminist visionary, her work emphasizes the possibility of creating new worlds, inspiring others to work toward social transformation with a narrative fierceness.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Computer Science
• Political Science
• Social Science
• Art
• Criminology
• Gender studies
• Law
• Medicine
• Nursing
• Literature
• Media studies
• Multimedia

Selected publications

• The Black Speculative Tradition

  Studies in the novel · 2024-12-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract: Far too often the speculative novel is erroneously understood as a primarily white and Western literary tradition; however, the truth is far more complex and interesting. While this intervention is well known in certain academic circles, thanks to literary historians like Isiah Lavender and Lisa Yaszek, those who do not study speculative fiction are often ignorant of the genre's actual history. This essay debunks this common inaccuracy in key ways. Foregrounding the work of authors from Martin Delany and Pauline Hopkins to Octavia E. Butler and Rivers Solomon, among others, this essay highlights that there has been a long history of Black speculative novels in the United States going back to the nineteenth century and that the contemporary Black speculative novel is built upon this robust literary tradition.

  PublisherDOI

• Ethnogothic Film

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2023-03-22

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Ethno-Gothic films frame the African American historical situation within a Gothic context, one that, Ytasha Womack argues, provides ethnic audiences a distinctive way of dealing with cultural trauma. While drawing heavily on a gothic tradition most often associated with horror, it merges that material with a Black cultural context, an iconography that emphasizes a haunting sense of otherness, which it then uses to interrogate the contemporary techno-scientific world—as both a repressive power and a power that might be turned upon itself—and to sketch the complexly haunted identity of the African American experience within a science fiction (sf) frame.

  PublisherDOI

• Healing Justice: A Framework for Collective Healing and Well-Being from Systemic Traumas

  Designing Interactive Systems Conference · 2022 · 26 citations

  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Criminology

  The 2020 Black Lives Matter protests in the United States demanded police reform and legislative action. Data-driven policing is just one technological intervention designed with the hope to tackle police brutality. However, these design interventions are often rooted in the continued racial profiling of poor and socially marginalized communities. Designers and researchers need a Healing Justice framework to circumvent this harm. Healing Justice addresses generational trauma and violence in marginalized communities and is not just a framework for policing but can address maternal mortality rates, COVID-19, medical malpractice, and other trauma issues. In this paper, we apply a Healing Justice framework to co-design activities focused on police brutality. We bridge Healing Justice and design by using an Afrofuturist Feminism framework, arguing that Healing Justice and Afrofuturist feminism frameworks lead to collective, grassroots, and pragmatic designs.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Bringing Black Feminist's Thoughts, Self-Definitions, and Creative Agency to Digital Media and Technology Design

  Proceedings of the ... Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences/Proceedings of the Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences · 2022 · 1 citations

  • Computer Science
  • Sociology
  • Computer Science

  Users from marginalized groups are often faced with the challenges that result from a lack of diverse thought in the design and implementation of media and technologies that we engage in our daily lives. It is these artifacts that result in the harm, erasure, and hyper-surveillance of Black and Brown people. We seek to disrupt problematic narratives present in tech and design fields by (re)inserting Black Feminism and leveraging our personal experiences to build on design methods. Though research centered on the importance of women’s experiences and standpoints in tech practice is crucial, feminist scholarship has not always reflected the values and the liberation of women who are not white. This paper uses personal narrative to argue for the value of Black feminist thought and methods in the sub-disciplines of computing, such as digital media, human computer interaction (HCI) and human-centered computing (HCC).

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• An OutKast Reader: Essays on Race, Gender, and the Postmodern South

  University of Georgia Press eBooks · 2021 · 26 citations

  • Sociology
  • Sociology
  • Gender studies
  PublisherDOI

• "Speculative blackness: The future of race in science fiction," by andré m. carrington

  Transformative Works and Cultures · 2019-03-15

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Review of andré m. carrington. Speculative blackness: The future of race in science fiction. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016. Hardcover, $87.50 (304p) ISBN 978-1452949758; paperback, $25 (292p) ISBN 978-0816678969; e-book, $14.50 (2717KB), ASIN B01CTOJSOI.

  PublisherDOI

• Dreaming of Afrofuturism, Epic Fantasy, and Utopia in N. K. Jemisin’s Dreamblood Duology

  2019-01-01 · 1 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
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• Afro-Atlantic Flight: Speculative Returns and the Black Fantastic by Michelle D. Commander

  CLA Journal · 2018-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  248 CLA JOURNAL Book Reviews Commander, Michelle D. Afro-Atlantic Flight: Speculative Returns and the Black Fantastic. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017. 296pp. ISBN: 978-08223 -6323-1. $25.95 Paperback. Afro-Atlantic Flight: Speculative Returns and the Black Fantastic is an ambitious, interdisciplinary, transnational analysis that delivers on its promise to invite readers to reconsider how Blacks (re)imagine connections to the past. Author Michelle Commander examines how Black writers, artists, and travelers from the United States imagine and enable literal and figurative returns to Africa in order to heal the lingering traumas of slavery. To do so, Commander looks at literature, film, travel writing, and ethnographic research to make sense of how Black cultural producers understand their identities and personal and cultural histories as they engage in imaginary flights or actual travel to the continent. At the heart of this study is Commander’s insistence that Black Americans engage in productive speculation when thinking and acting on their connections to, what can feel like to some, a nebulous African heritage. And while she takes a critical eye to the possibility of any unhealthy nostalgia or romanticization of Africa, AfroAtlantic Flight ultimately makes a persuasive case that yearning for and seeking out a motherland has potentially revolutionary possibilities. Commander opens the text by clearly defining her terms. “Afro-Atlantic” repositions the significance of those of African descent in transatlantic crossings. However, perhaps most importantly, the term “flight” is reimagined. Although the phrase “flights of fancy” has a negative connotation, Commander’s reconceptualization of flight emphasizes the legacy of the tales of Flying Africans. That legacy is a significant and well-chosen motif throughout the project that underscores the long history that Black Americans have in creating both psychic and physical reconnections to Africa. Interestingly, while she frequently uses the terms “fantastic,” “speculation,” and “speculative” and even engages the work of speculative fiction writer Octavia Butler, Commander is clear that her analysis is not a work of Afrofuturist criticism. Rather this project is less interested in how Blacks envision themselves in the future or with futurist technologies, but rather with how they conceive of cultural connections that have been frayed or even severed. Nevertheless, despite that caveat, this text will certainly be of use to those interested in Afrofuturism, as Commander’s argument about the revolutionary potential of Black speculation has a productive overlap with some of the core interests of Afrofuturism. After the introduction, the text is divided into four chapters that skillfully cover wide-ranging topics. Commander is far from a jack-of-all-trades and a master of none; she is equally adept in literary analysis as she is discussing films such as Sankofa or engaging in auto-ethnographic research. Chapters three and CLA JOURNAL 249 Book Reviews four, which cover cultural tourism in Brazil and the U.S. South respectively, are particularly fascinating. In chapter 3, for example, Commander engages the notion of “saudade” or nostalgic longing in the travels of Black Americans to Bahia, Brazil. Bahia emerges as a site of African retentions that do not require travel to the continent. Commander contrasts the racial and class politics of Brazil versus both Ghana (which she discusses in chapter two) and the United States, dispelling notions that the South American nation is a post-racial utopia, while also recognizing its status as a place for possible physical and psychic returns to African heritage not often seen in the States. The conclusion, which briefly takes up the burgeoning importance of DNA testing and what that might mean, leaves the reader with even more interesting possibilities for the future of Afro-Atlantic speculation. Overall, Afro-Atlantic Flight is a timely interdisciplinary take on the desires and realities that Blacks in America have for truly diasporic connections. It will be of interest to a variety of disciplines, including literary studies, African American studies, tourism studies, and ethnographic studies. Ultimately, Afro-Atlantic Flight is a provocative and fascinating text that will also invite further study even as it engages and answers its own questions in critical and significant ways. —Susana M. Morris Georgia Institute of Technology Susana M. Morris is a scholar of Black Feminism, Black Digital Media, and Afrofuturism...

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• More than Human

  The Black Scholar · 2016-04-02 · 17 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  In her collection of essays The Black Interior, poet and critic Elizabeth Alexander asks two important questions about the nature of black cultural practice: “What do we learn when we pause at site...

  PublisherDOI

• Black Internationalist Feminism: Woman Writers of the Black Left, 1945–1995 from Sugar to Revolution: Women's Visions of Haiti, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic

  American Literature · 2015-09-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Book Review| September 01 2015 Black Internationalist Feminism: Woman Writers of the Black Left, 1945–1995 from Sugar to Revolution: Women's Visions of Haiti, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic Black Internationalist Feminism: Woman Writers of the Black Left, 1945–1995. By Higashida, Cheryl. Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press. 2011. xi, 250 pp. Cloth, $50.00; paper, $25.00; e-book available.From Sugar to Revolution: Women's Visions of Haiti, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic. By Chancy, Myriam J. A.. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press. 2012. xxxiii, 358 pp. Cloth, $85.00; paper, $32.24. Susana M. Morris Susana M. Morris Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Literature (2015) 87 (3): 616–618. https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-3149465 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Susana M. Morris; Black Internationalist Feminism: Woman Writers of the Black Left, 1945–1995 from Sugar to Revolution: Women's Visions of Haiti, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic. American Literature 1 September 2015; 87 (3): 616–618. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-3149465 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsAmerican Literature Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2015 by Duke University Press2015 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

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Frequent coauthors

• Brittney Cooper

  San Francisco State University

  4 shared

• Stacey A. Robinson

  Environment and Climate Change Canada

  1 shared

• Kaila Adia Story

  1 shared

• Wendy M. Laybourn

  University of Memphis

  1 shared

• Aisha Durham

  University of South Florida

  1 shared

• Clinton R. Fluker

  1 shared

• Howard Rambsy

  1 shared

• James E. Ford III

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• Faculty Excellence in Research Award, Georgia Institute of T…
• Principal Investigator, The Earthseed Project (Mellon Founda…
• GT DILAC-A Grant Award for "Earthseed: Afrofuturism and Blac…
• GVU/IPaT/GTRI Seed Grant Award for Healing Justice: Co-Desig…
• “Thanks For Being a Great Teacher!” Award, Center for Teachi…