Roger Sneed’s The Dreamer and the Dream interrogates the transcendence and disruption of truncated and constipated expressions of Black religious experience. Envisioning an Afrofuturistic turn in Black religious discourse, Sneed is indebted to Victor Anderson’s powerful critiques offered in Creative Exchange (2008) and Beyond Ontological Blackness (1999). Afrofuturism is responsive to the cultural ingratiation of White supremacy, but is unbound to the dictates of Whiteness as an ideological, cultural, and social frame of reference for either Black humanity or religious experience. Drawing upon the same cultural and intellectual zeitgeist guiding Black religious thought as an iconoclastic response to White religio-racial constructs, Sneed argues that Afrofuturistic religious orientations explode and reimagine Black religious meaning-making.
The opening chapters discuss race in popular culture and science fiction, and spotlight pioneering thinkers who fuse Black religion and Afrofuturism. Citing the paucity of Black representation in popular science fiction, Sneed critiques the adjunct status of...
University of California Press