While Oprah Winfrey and director Ava DuVernay’s Queen Sugar series isn’t a sci-fi fantasy, it does deal with time travel on a symbolic level. The central narrative is their family drama, but Queen Sugar also tackles the African American nostalgia for – or fear of – symbolic time travel. Therefore, in the general US historical imagination, for black people, leaving the south was tantamount to travelling to the future. As a show deeply informed by its diverse depictions of blackness, Queen Sugar taps into the “progress narrative” historical zeitgeist of African Americans. If the series so far is any indication, Queen Sugar will continue to wrestle with the themes of time and space travel in complex and interesting ways.

Source: The Guardian September 28, 2016 07:52 UTC