James B. Haile III, ”The Dark Delight of Being Strange: Black Stories of Freedom” (Columbia UP, 2024)

An ambitious genre-crossing exploration of Black speculative imagination, The Dark Delight of Being Strange: Black Stories of Freedom (Columbia University Press 2024) 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, James B. Haile, III, traces how Black speculative fiction responds to enslavement, racism, colonialism, and capitalism and how it reveals a life beyond social and political alienation. He re-envisions 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, among others. Looking at Black life through the lens of speculative fiction, this book transports readers to alternative worlds and spaces while remaining squarely rooted in present-day struggles. In so doing, it 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.
Offering new ways to grasp the meanings and implications of Black freedom, The Dark Delight of Being Strange invites us to reimagine history and memory, time and space, our identities and ourselves.

Winner, 2025 Hugh J. Silverman Book Prize, Association for Philosophy and Literature

Finalist, 2025 PEN America Open Book Award

James B. Haile III is a Professor of English & Philosophy at the University of Rhode Island. You can find him at the University of Rhode Island Philosophy Department website.

You can find the host, Sullivan Summer, online, on Instagram, and at Substack, where she and Dr. Haile continue their conversation.

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