ENG 4934 Spring 2023 Tran

In this course, we will explore how minoritized authors and artists have turned to science and speculative fiction as a means to reflect on, critique, and imagine alternatives to existing conditions of material inequity and social injustice. We will examine how their writing and cultural productions open up “minor universes,” that is, worlds that turn on and around the minor. The texts we will engage foreground subjects, histories, and spaces that have been marginalized, neglected, or otherwise rendered invisible. Together, we will inquire how authors such as Octavia Butler, N.K. Jemisin, Ken Liu, Sara Rivera, and Rebecca Roanhorse, among others, reinvent our understanding of time travel, unsettle what constitutes the “human,” and narrate alternative histories and futures. We will discuss, moreover, how the genre of science and speculative fiction functions for people of color, not as a means of escape or merely a form of entertainment but as a radical effort to envision the possibility of better, more just and joyful, worlds.

Course Pre-Requisites: Ninety semester hours of college work

Social Justice & Speculative Fic