BrittNEY Frantece (she/her)

Brittney Frantece completed her degree in the fall of 2024. She is currently the 2024-2026 Thurgood Marshall Fellow in the African and African American Studies Department at Dartmouth College. She is a literary and art critic and curator who specializes in Black contemporary horror and science fiction. Her research questions and reading methods are rooted in Black studies, addressing philosophical concerns of alternative epistemology, ontology, and world-building.

Her dissertation, Imagine Another World: A Philosophical Approach to Black Speculative Arts and Literature, examines Black American contemporary science fiction, surreal, and horror novels, films, and visual arts, including Tananarive Due’s “The Rider” (2023), Wangechi Mutu’s All the Way Up, All the Way Out (2012), and Jordan Peele’s Us (2019).  This work reads into the expressed conditions of Blackness that yearns for and that builds other material or immaterial realities. Worldbuilding is a way for collective Black imaginations to experience another world that is at the very least different from the anti-Black world order.  Some of the questions that run throughout the chapters are: Why would Black cultural producers need to explore and build other worlds? How are these other worlds built?  How can they be accessed or known, or how/why do they deliberately prevent access? These questions provide a philosophical exploration of the otherworldly representations in contemporary Black arts.