AFRCNA 1120 - MORE BLACK FUTURES

Minimum Credits: 3
Maximum Credits: 3
What happens when Black bodies are projected and propelled across time, across space, and across the so-called digital divide? How are contemporary boundaries of margin and center troubled by the advent of newer technologies? In this course we will discuss what is conventionally and conveniently called science fiction, and we will explore the relative limitations of this nomenclature as Black writers, artists, and intellectuals conceptualize radical models of representation through progressive approaches to genre and form, designing what has been sited as afrofuturism. Considering that agency and subjectivity are inevitably mediated through a shifting conjunction of race, class, gender, sexuality, and nationality, it is crucial that we calculate the extent to which what we understand to be reality is informed by ruptures in and modifications of world media. (So an important point of interest becomes, which world are we imagining actually? How many worlds are there anyway?) During this term we will discuss contemporary uses of a range of speculative text rooted in what was once known as the African diaspora, including but not limited to novels by Octavia Butler and Samuel Delany, films by Sun Ra and Haile Gerima, and music by George Clinton and MF DOOM. We will think through the ways in which Blackness in particular and race in general are constructed and reconfigured as cultural workers theorize new modes of critical resistance. With attention to sound and sounding, plus space and spatiality, we will investigate the ways in which alternative histories and presents are imagined through the production of possible futures.
Academic Career: Undergraduate
Course Component: Lecture
Grade Component: Letter Grade

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