Breaking the cycle? Black lives matter in the future. Haunted futures in An Unkindness of Ghosts (Rivers Solomon, 2017), Friday Black (Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, 2018) and Riot Baby (Tochi Onyebuchi, 2020)

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This paper aimed to show how Rivers Solomon, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah and Tochi Onyebuchi, three Black writers who were born at the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s in the United States explore the violence of the 'postracial' age through science fiction tropes. The paper showed how the three works of art play with tenses, time loops and repetition to show the persistence of the same racial mechanisms inherited from slavery and renewed through segregation and mass incarceration. Through the three writers set their plots in (near) futures, these fictional futures are haunted by the past, whether diegetic or extratextual. Although grounded in (science) fiction, An Unkindness of Ghosts, Friday Black and Riot Baby can be read alongside Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (2010) and Patrisse Cullors and Asha Bandele’s When they Call you a Terrorist: a Black Lives Matter Memoir (2018), both denouncing the persistent racial violence underpinning the 'postracial' age and aiming to restore complexity, agency, and love.