AFST 380KAfrican Futures Beyond Wakanda

Catalog

Why do people tell stories about the future? How does such storytelling rooted in the African continent and particular African histories differ from similar projects elsewhere? What effects can such storytelling have and what kinds of possibilities do they enable? This course explores the long African tradition of speculative fiction and science fiction storytelling in a range of creative media such as fiction, art, film and music from the continent and diaspora. Students will engage with theoretical and historical writings that address past and present visions of political futures to assess whether they allow for escapism, responses to complicated histories, challenge to current kinds of oppression or avenues for imagining new social configurations and world orders. We will draw on indigenous and diasporic ideas of Africa to understand how texts from South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya and beyond by authors including Nnedi Okarafor, Lauren Beukes, Namwali Serpell and Ngugi wa Thiong'o reimagine Black possibility by blending mythology, technology, history, and social critique. Analyzing these visions in conversation with scholarship by African intellectuals and cultural critics, we will come to understand the ways "Africa" has been imagined by those in and outside it and its spaces, times, histories, and identities used as the basis for anti-colonial, non-extractive, beyond-human futures.