AML 5296 Spring 2019 Tran

This course takes as its point of departure Walidah Imarisha and adrienne marie brown’s re-framing 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, film, and visual art—including works by Bong Joon-ho, Octavia Butler, Marjorie Liu, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Ruth Ozeki, Manjula Padmanabhan, M. NourbeSe Philip, Sabrina Vourvoulias, 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 and Ethnofuturisms more broadly, such as Aimee Bahng, Seo-young Chu, Samuel R. Delany, Mark Dery, Sami Schalk, and Ytasha Womack.

Required texts:

• Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda, Monstress (2016): ISBN: 978-1632157096
• Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Certain Dark Things: A Novel (2016): ISBN: 978-1250099082
• Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being (2013)- ISBN: 978-0143124870
• Sabrina Vourvoulias, Ink (2018)- ISBN: 978-0998705996
• Colson Whitehead, The Intuitionist (2000)- ISBN: 978-0385493000