ENGL 3332 is also offered in Spring 2025
ENGL 3332 is also offered in Spring 2022
Spring 2022 | ENGL 3332 Section 001: Black Times: Afrofuturism, Afropessimism and the Future (Ends) of the World (68610)
- Instructor(s)
- Class Component:
- Lecture
- Credits:
- 3 Credits
- Grading Basis:
- Student Option
- Instructor Consent:
- No Special Consent Required
- Instruction Mode:
- In Person Term Based
- Class Attributes:
UMNTC Liberal Education Requirement
- Times and Locations:
Regular Academic Session
Mon,
Wed 11:15AM - 12:30PM
UMTC, East Bank
Pillsbury Hall 314
- Enrollment Status:
Closed (30 of 30 seats filled)
- Also Offered:
- Course Catalog Description:
- In 1993, Mark Dery coined the term Afrofuturism to describe "[s]peculative fiction that treats African-American themes and addresses African-American concerns in the context of twentieth- century technoculture - and, more generally, African-American signification that appropriates images of technology and a prosthetically enhanced future." At the same time, Dery places this fictional treatment of Black futures in the context of a history systematically denied. Afropessimism, on the other hand, emerges at the turn of the 21st century in an interview between Saidiya Hartman and Frank B. Wilderson III as a meta theory that evinces a skepticism about the utility of the term Human to understand the positionality of blackness in an antiblack world. Blackness, for Afropessemists, becomes a technology by which the Human constitutes its Humanity as difference. This body of work generally understands the end of antiblackness as only possible with the destruction of "the world," understood to be definitionally antiblack. Starting with W.E.B. Du Bois's "The Comet," this course traces the relationships between African American literature, politics and sociality through the representation of blackness in relationship to technology. This course interrogates Dery's description of Afro Futurism as both descriptive and ideological. Put another way, this class is attentive to the way that the future is signified in the contemporary world as well as the fact that, following Afropessimism's analysis, that world, and thus this mode of signifying blackness, may itself be antiblack. As a result, this course juxtaposes traditionally, technologically, Afrofuturist works, with those such as Parable of the Sower, The Broken Earth Trilogy, and An Unkindness of Ghosts that depict Black futures at or after the apocalypse. Students should expect to think and rethink the relationship between technology as a signifier of the future and those structures that continue antiblackness and colonialism.
- Class Description:
- Student may contact the instructor or department for information.
- Textbooks:
- https://bookstores.umn.edu/course-lookup/68610/1223
ClassInfo Links - Spring 2022 English Classes