123220 SE Literary Seminar / BA-Arbeit / MA American/North American Lit./Studies (2023S)

AFROFUTURISM IN NORTH AMERICAN LITERATURE
Synopsis: In this seminar in American literary studies, we will explore how African American literatures have imagined black futures out of the bedrock of Afrodiasporic experience from the early 20th century onward. We will explore instances of black science fiction in terms of Afrofuturism—a term coined by Mark Dery in 1993—as a cultural aesthetic underpinned by a philosophy of science and history that addresses themes and concerns of the African American diaspora such as alienation of the black body, postapocalyptic temporalities, and science/spirituality intersections. Through an Afrofuturist technocritical lens, we will explore Black speculative literatures from the US, Canada, and the Caribbean.

The goal of this seminar is to familiarize students with Afrofuturism as a concept as well as with African American literary writing in the 20th and 21st centuries and to enable them to write an independent research paper in this field.
Teaching methods: input phases, pair and group work, class discussions