Primarily, the film brought me back to an article by Professor Ruha Benjamin 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.
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