The Mothership Connection: Black Science Fiction Across Media

As science fiction becomes the lingua franca of American popular culture and race takes center stage in our contemporary social and political discourses, the works of black SF creators offer a number of powerful conceptual tools for thinking about race, and particularly for exploring the experience and effects of the African diaspora. This course will consider how black authors, artists, musicians, and filmmakers have responded to or engaged the transmedia genre of SF, as well as the role that race plays in the history of science fiction. What is Afrofuturism, and is it distinct from black science fiction? How does black SF relate to other speculative genres and aesthetics (horror, fantasy, new age, psychedelia, etc.)? Is there something inherently science fictional about the Afro-diasporic experience? How do typical SF tropes - robots, spaceships, technology, the apocalypse, the posthuman - change when considered in the aftermath of the Miiddle Passage and chattel slavery?