Inventing Persons in Invented Worlds

Lovecraft Country is a genre-bending television series created by screenwriter and director, Misha Green, which spans the categories of speculative fiction, horror, historical fiction, fantasy, and drama. I will interrogate Lovecraft as an instrument of metaphysics that exposes the way power, violence, coloniality, anti-Blackness, and kinship function in religious and cultural imaginations. In the face of unyielding gratuitous violence—physical and psychic—against Black people, I contend that “making a way out of no way,” a core assumption in womanist methodologies, is a practice of transubstantiating reversal magic against intractable colonial sorcery/colonialcraft, which is illustrated throughout the limited HBO series. This portal of speculative fiction offers an exploration of magic that seeks to seed possibilities for releasing the discursive grip on the humanist axiological framework, as we remember and recollect sources of imaginational, lingual/linguistic, sensorial, material, affective, and divine power which are not dependent upon legibility as “human.”