Rivers Solomon’s An Unkindness of Ghosts: Cruel Optimism and Meritocracy in an Engendered Critical Dystopia

Abstract

Rivers Solomon’s debut An Unkindness of Ghosts (2017) criticizes the American myth of meritocracy and its cruel optimism (cf. Berlant 2011), promoting as it does equality and acceptance for any U.S. citizen. This Black feminist speculative novel presents a future world where slavery is revived on the HSS Matilda, a spaceship divided into upper and lower decks, which represents Antebellum plantation logic. Matilda carries people from the ruins of Earth to a mythical Promised Land, and thus the novel presents the fight of Black women, and particularly of queer Black subjects, against white supremacy, racism and marginalization, especially through the physical and emotional journey of Aster, the main character. Relying on the poetics of critical dystopian writing, the novel imagines a queer futurity for Black and queer Black people in the United States against discrimination, inequality and the lie of a meritocratic ideal.