Intransigent Imaginaries Black Ambivalence in Media and Culture

Intransigent Imaginaries: Black Ambivalence in Media and Culture examines why Blackness continues to function as antagonism in fantasy, science fiction, and horror, even in contemporary films and television created by Black artists and celebrated for their progressive politics. Drawing on Afropessimism, psychoanalysis, and genre theory, Jerome P. Dent, Jr. argues that genre itself organizes desire, threat, and narrative closure in ways that consistently position Blackness as danger, excess, or containment. Rather than focusing on whether representations are positive or negative, the book shifts attention to the narrative architectures and visual economies that make those images possible in the first place. Through close readings of works such as Get Out, Us, Nope, Black Panther, A Wrinkle in Time, and major science fiction franchises, Intransigent Imaginaries challenges dominant assumptions about progress, representation, and repair. Refusing the consolations of uplift, the book insists on analytic clarity, asking what criticism looks like when redemption is structurally foreclosed.