Studies African American Lit

Catalog description

Black Speculative Fiction. In an interview in the African-American Review, speculative fiction writer Nalo Hopkinson asserts that "science fiction has always been a subversive literature" because it forces the reader to "think twice and thrice about a whole bunch of things in relation to each other: sexuality, race, class, color, history." Using this framework as an entry point, we will explore the following questions: is there a distinct tradition of Black Speculative Fiction? How might a culture that has, in Hopkinson's words, "been on the receiving end of the colonization glorified in some science fiction" negotiate and politicize the genre? Does Black Speculative fiction (defined here to encompass science fiction, fantasy, cyberpunk, Afro-futurism etc.) cause one, in fact, "to think twice and thrice" about race, class, and sexuality? Finally, does the tradition challenge our basic assumptions of identity, or does it ultimately work to normalize them? Throughout the semester, we will examine the ways Black writers, filmmakers and musicians have used speculative methods to defamiliarize our assumptions regarding "familiar" social issues such as race, class, gender, and disability. Prerequisite: English 225, or 227, or 228, or 229, or 231, or 232, or 273. LAVAN.