AML 5608 Fall 2021 Montgomery

Fall
2021
AML 5608
Studies in the African American Literary Tradition: Rewriting the Future: The Postapocalyptic Black Female Imagination
M. L. Montgomery
mmontgomery@fsu.edu

This course surveys representative works of speculative fiction and expressive culture by black women in an Afro-diasporic geography, including the United States, Africa, and the Anglo Caribbean. We will read and discuss fiction by Octavia Butler, Nalo Hopkinson, and Nnedi Okorafor alongside texts by authors previously excluded from an Afro-futurist canon, such as Jesmyn Ward, Edwidge Danticat, and Gloria Naylor. Notions of history, hybridity, liminality, and border-crossing will figure prominently in our investigative undertaking as will ideas surrounding the role of queered bodies and their role in framing futuristic imaginaries. Our inquiry culminates with a discussion of Beyoncé's visual album Black Is King as an instance of black women's intervention into fantasy culture.

Using the work of Mark Dery, George Lipsitz, Tricia Rose, Greg Tate, Ytasha L. Womack, and others as the discursive springboard for our discussion, this course enables a critique of mainstream science fiction's reliance upon tropes of whiteness, maleness, and heterosexual normativity. Ultimately, our investigation seeks to expand the scholarly conversation surrounding black fantasy culture in ways that take into account contributions by black women across the trans-Atlantic world.

Required Texts:

  • Jessmyn Ward, Salvage the Bones
  • Edwidge Danticat, Claire of the Sea Light
  • Octavia Butler, Fledgling
  • Toni Morrison, Tar Baby
  • Gloria Naylor, Mama Day
  • Nnedi Okorafor, Binti
  • Nalo Hopkinson, Brown Girl in the Ring
  • Erna Brodber, Myal
  • Beyonce, Black Is King

Recommended Readings:

  • Ytasha L. Womack, Afro-Futurism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture
  • George Lipsitz, Dangerous Crossroads: Popular Music, Postmodernism, and the Poetics of Place
  • Mary Dery, ed. Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture
  • Kristen Lillvis, Posthuman Blackness and the Black Female Imagination
  • Lamonda Horton Stallings, Mutha is Half a Word
  • Sheree Thomas, ed. Dark Matter: Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora

Requirements: This course satisfies the requirement for coursework in Postcolonial, Transnational, Gender, and Cultural Studies or for Areas of Concentration: History of a Literary Genre (Fiction). It also meets the Alterity requirement.