AML 5296 Spring 2023 Tran

This course takes as its point of departure Walidah Imarisha and adrienne maree brown’s reframing of science and speculative fiction as visionary fiction. Their assertion that the capacity to imagine better worlds is vital to projects of social justice will inform our critical engagements with literary, cultural, and theoretical texts this semester. We will explore in particular how minoritized authors and artists elaborate “Ethnofuturisms” by constructing fugitive worlds that unsettle normative conceptions of time, space, and embodiment. We will read across a range of cultural media—poetry, short stories, novels, and graphic novels—including works by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Mohsin Hamid, M. NourbeSe Philip, Rebecca Roanhorse, and more. Together, we will discuss how they mobilize speculative imaginaries and revise popular science fictional tropes to critique technologies of racialization, to explore alternative embodiments and representations of the “human,” and to illuminate the possibility of other modes of collectivity and solidarity. To inform our readings of these cultural texts, we will think alongside the scholarship of theorists of science and speculative fiction, techno-orientalism, Afrofuturism, Indigenous futurism, Latin@futurism, and Ethnofuturisms more broadly, such as Aimee Bahng, Samuel R. Delany, Alexis Lothian, Cathryn Merla-Watson, and Sami Schalk.