Drawing on Black feminist/womanist storytelling and the three-dimensional narrative inquiry space, this article showcases how one Black girl uses speculative fiction as testimony and counterstory, calling for readers to bear witness to her experiences and inviting witnesses to respond to the negative experiences she faces as a Black girl in the United States. I argue that situating speculative fiction as counterstory creates space for Black girls to challenge dominant narratives and create new realities. Furthermore, I argue that considering speculative fiction as testimony provides another way for readers to engage in a dialogic process with Black girls, affirming their words as legitimate sources of knowledge. Witnessing Black girls’ stories is an essential component to literacy and social justice contexts that tout a humanizing approach to research. They are also vital for dismantling a system bent on the castigation and obliteration of Black girls’ pasts, presents, and futures.
Purpose
This paper aims to identify how white preservice teachers’ inability to imagine an equitable space for Black and Brown children contributes to the ubiquity of whiteness in English education. Further, the authors contend that the preservice teachers’ responses mirror how the larger field of English education fails to imagine Black and Brown life.
Design/methodology/approach
Using abolitionist teaching as a guide, the authors use reflexive thematic analysis to examine the rhetorical moves their preservice teachers made to defer responsibility for anti-racist teaching.
Findings
The findings show preservice teachers’ rhetorical moves across three themes: failure to imagine Black and Brown humanity, failure to imagine a connection between theory and practice, and failure to imagine curriculum and schooling beyond whiteness.
Originality/value
By highlighting how preservice teachers fail to imagine spaces for Black and Brown youth, this study offers another pathway through which teacher educators, teachers and English education programs can assist their faculty and students in activating their imaginations in the pursuit of anti-racist, abolitionist teaching.
Emancipating the fantastic from dominant narratives requires educators to center Black authors and characters, highlight stories beyond Black pain, and show a commitment to broadening Black girls' mirrors and telescopes. S amuel R. Delaney, a queer Black male author of science fiction (SF), argued that the imagistic paraphernalia of science fiction functioned as social signs-signs people learned to read very quickly. They signaled technology. And technology was like a placard on the door saying, "Boys Club! Girls, keep out. Blacks and Hispanics and the poor in general, go away!" (Dery, 1994, p. 188
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