They Cloned Blaxploitation: Exploring Blaxperimentation and Black Futures in Film

Despite waiting months for the movie They Cloned Tyrone to come out, I still forgot about the official drop date. But even though I am late, the film was very much on time, and it brought up several themes that have appeared in some of the articles and books I am reading, as well as other television series and films from the past few years. Primarily, the film brought me back to <a href="https://catalystjournal.org/index.php/catalyst/article/view/28798" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">an article by Professor Ruha Benjamin</a> titled “Racial fictions, biological facts: Expanding the Sociological Imagination through speculative methods.” in which Benjamin makes the statement that “Social scientists, for our part, are often in the business of documenting dystopias, which offer a starting point for imagining alternatives” (Benjamin 19). And she references the sociologist and writer W.E.B. DuBois, whose science fiction story “The Comet” is considered the first example of African-American speculative fiction. And for Benjamin and many others, DuBois is also the first example of using social science research to inform speculative imagining by bridging the gap between science and storytelling, or what Benjamin describes as biological facts and racial fiction. <a href="https://faitheday.medium.com/from-blaxploitation-to-blaxperimentation-exploring-black-futures-through-the-medium-of-film-a0bc1e5d1f20">Visit Now</a>