Black to the Future: Race as Science Fiction

Charting an interdisciplinary path, this course will teach students literary and visual analysis through fiction, film, comics, and graphic novels to explore debates in the 20th and 21st century around how to read blackness. What is the relationship between the history of African Americans and the speculative genre? What tools does it afford African American writers and artists that other genres of fiction do not? How does Black science fiction in both literary and visual form, teach us how to see and read blackness otherwise? Key artists include George Schuyler, W.E.B. DuBois, N.K. Jemison, Janelle Monae, Octavia Butler, among others.