Black Women Ruin Everything: Utopia, Dystopia, and the Future (Ends) of the World

Catalog description

This seminar is grounded in three premises. The first is that “the world” is founded on anti-blackness (though not anti-blackness alone). The second is that Black feminists write with an awareness of this fact and a desire to imagine the world otherwise. The third is that as a result Black feminism is a form speculative fiction. This course considers how contemporary afrofuturist texts written by Black feminists critique the gendered anti-blackness that effects black peoples’ life chances. It also considers how these texts go beyond imagining a future predicated on enrolling Black being into existing hierarchies of Man. Put otherwise, this course will investigate how Black feminist writers have used “speculative fiction" to image not only their own freedom but also the freedom of all beings arranged within the social and political hierarchies built upon their supposed abjection.