|
|
48358
|
Lecture-Discussion
|
G
|
3:00PM
-4:50PM
|
R
|
English Building
|
Jenkins, C
|
- Part of Term:
- 1
- Date Range:
- 01/14/19-05/01/19
- Section Title:
- Speculative Pessimisms
- Section Info:
- Meets with ENGL 553 G. Speculative Pessimisms: Social Death and the Afro-Future - This course will engage with what has been described as the genre turn in 21st century African American cultural production - the literary and cultural movement called Afrofuturism, as well as black speculative fiction more broadly - alongside a school of thought that has garnered, recently, a great deal of both positive and negative attention in the field: Afro-Pessimism. The latter argues that the position of the black subject in Western society is synonymous with that of the Slave, a condition of non-being—absolute fungibility and subjection - based in the slave’s status not as worker, but commodity. Our project will be to consider how these two movements might have both a similarly pessimistic and a similarly imaginative provenance. The Afro-Pessimist position insists that the violent exclusion of black non-being creates the conditions for the existence of the Human, and indeed that civil society’s structuring around anti-blackness, and the position of the black subject vis-a-vis that society, is one of irreconcilable antagonism. How might we understand this analysis as a speculative one - in Jared Sexton’s words, how might we unpack “the rhetorical dimensions of the discourse of Afro-Pessimism [. . .] and the productive theoretical effects of the fiction it creates”? Conversely, how might we consider the increasingly wide reach of the speculative, writ broadly, in 21st century black literature and culture, concomitantly with the evident pessimism about the world, as it exists, that would elicit such imaginative projects? Might we understand contemporary Afrofuturism and the speculative both as tending towards the pessimistic, either in inspiration—turning to the future, and to other sorts of alternative timelines, in response to a painful and disappointing present—or in narrative outcome, wherein these speculative works depict dark, dystopian futures or dwell within and bring to life an unbearable past? Throughout this semester, we will unpack not only what possibilities thinking Afro-Pessimism and Afrofuturism/the black speculative together might open up for the analysis of 21st century African American literature and culture, but also what we might learn from this juxtaposition about both the potential and the pitfalls of each mode of theorizing contemporary black life. Primary texts may include fiction by Jesmyn Ward, Colson Whitehead, Octavia Butler, Victor LaValle, Nnedi Okorafor, and N.K. Jemisin, and films by Jordan Peele, Ryan Coogler, and Janelle Monae; critical texts will include selected work from, at minimum, Frank Wilderson, Jared Sexton, Saidiya Hartman, David Marriott, Terrion Williamson, Kinitra Brooks, Tina Campt, Hortense Spillers, Alex Weheliye, and Fred Moten. Participation, two short critical response papers, oral presentation, final seminar paper.
- Restriction(s):
-
Restricted to Graduate - Urbana-Champaign.
|