Southern Trajectories in Early Black Feminist Speculative Fiction: Mary Etta Spencer’s The Resentment

The essay recovers an understudied African American woman writer, Mary Etta Spencer, and argues that her only known novel, The Resentment (1921), builds on a tradition of early Black feminist speculative fiction that belongs to the prehistory of Afrofuturism. The contextualization of The Resentment within the genre of speculative fiction reveals Iola Leroy; Or, Shadows Uplifted (1892) to be a particularly significant intertext of Spencer’s novel. Spencer builds on Iola Leroy in order to articulate a vision of the New South that centers on Black progress and foregrounds the impact of African American women and men on the future of the entire nation. The essay offers a close critical reading of The Resentment that reveals how Spencer strategically deploys a male-centered cover story to introduce the more innovative and experimental features of her novel: the portrayal of her heroine as a new Black woman of the South, the expansion of gender roles, a more explicit discussion of sexuality, and the articulation of a collective utopian space for Black women. To do so, Spencer breaks new narrative ground through her heroine’s participation in discourses of family planning and reproductive rights, challenging assumptions about African American women writers’ reticence about issues of sexuality.