ENGL3332: Black Times: Afrofuturism, Afropessimism and the Future (Ends) of the World

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. Additionally, students should also expect to gain a broad conceptualization of African American speculative fiction. Finally, students can expect to read texts of Black fiction that imagine futures in ways beyond the disasters of not only antiblackness, but of misogyny, heterosexism, ableism, and transphobia.

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