[AAS 2657/ ENGL 2599]

When most people think of reggae music, they think of lazing out on a Caribbean beach with a marijuana spliff and nodding to the music of Bob Marley. But what is the history of the music of which Marley is the most visible ambassador? How did the music of a small Caribbean island become a worldwide...

Superheroes, space operas, time travel, futuristic tech — the stuff of dreams and the subject of countless popular literary and cultural works over the past century. Far too long featuring mainly white male heroes and US or European settings, sci-fi and fantasy (SF/F) have become increasingly diverse in recent years, even as reframed definitions open up archives of previously overlooked black and brown genre writing from across the globe. Still, the Caribbean is often ignored, imagined either as a rustic beach or a technological backwater. In this undergraduate seminar, however, you will...

What makes us human? How did science and technology play a part in racism and the dehumanization of blackness? And how have artists of color re-appropriated science, technology, and science fiction to subvert and resist dehumanization? This course is an introduction to Afrofuturism, exploring the intersections of race and alienness, race and technology, and race and modernity through global futuristic representations of blackness in TV, film, music, art, and literature. In this discussion-based seminar, we will trace “like race” tropes in sci-fi, including aliens, monsters, enslavement...