The Black Fantastic: Sci-Fi, Horror, and Fantasy in the Black Diaspora

Catalog description

Get Out. Black Panther. Lovecraft Country. From the gothic to the galactic, Black artists, writers, and filmmakers are revolutionizing sci-fi, horror, and fantasy on the page and screen. In this course, we will explore how Black creators harness supernatural, speculative, and fantastical modes of storytelling to reinterpret the past and dream up possible futures. Relying on frameworks like Gothic Blackness, Afrofuturism, and Black Quantum Futurisms as our guide, we'll time-travel through the Black speculative imaginary, moving from the cyberpunk dystopia of Janelle Monae's Dirty Computer to the haunted university halls in Mariama Diallo's Master. As we decode each text's approach to race, power, and resistance, we'll uncover how the Black Fantastic doesn't just reimagine genre conventions and tropes; it fundamentally challenges our understanding of time, space, and reality. Join us as we investigate how Black horror, science fiction, and fantasy excavate the past, confront the present, and imagine liberatory futures. Course texts include NK Jemisin's The Fifth Season, Mariama Diallo's Master, Nnedi Okorafor's Binti, and Janelle Monae's Dirty Computer.