Week 12 Blog Post Assignment
We have finally arrived at my favorite week: Afrofuturism. There are so many readings and videos I haven’t included in this week’s readings. Still, I am very excited about the ones we’ll be thinking with. For this week, we get to watch Black Panther, listen to and watch some Janelle Monáe, and we’ll read Bould’s introduction to Afrofuturim from a special issue of the journal Science Fiction Studies.
Discussing Afrofuturism is another way to discuss the ways Black voices have been marginalized and Black experiences have been erased by the dominant culture. It provides no escape to a post-racial future, but instead centers the stories of Black folks. Instead of avoiding or smoothing over the subject of race, Afrofuturist works explore race and racism in a multitude of creative ways.
Below I have selected three quotes from Bould’s article. Please choose one and discuss it using examples from the rest of the materials we read for class. You may also need to draw on other examples of science fiction or Afrofuturism to help support your claims. Please do make sure you discuss the quote in the context of the article. In other words, do not take the quotes out of context. Revisit the passages to make sure you are engaging with the full meaning of the quote in relation to the rest of the article.
And by presenting racism as an insanity that burned itself out, or as the obvious folly of the ignorant and impoverished who would be left behind by the genre’s brave new futures, sf avoids confronting the structures of racism and its own complicity in them. (p. 180)
But sf is “a point of cultural departure” for all of these writers and musicians, because “it allows for a series of worst-case futures-of hells-on-Earth and being in them-which are woven into every kind of everyday present reality” (“Loving the Alien”). The “central fact” of the black sf they produce “is an acknowledgement that Apocalypse already happened,” that, in Public Enemy’s words, “Armageddon been in effect.” (p. 180)
Rather, it is the contention of this issue that sf and sf studies have much to learn from the experience of technoculture that Afrofuturist texts register across a wide range of media; and that sf studies, if it is to be at all radical, must use its position of relative privilege to provide a home for excluded voices without forcing assimilation upon them. (p. 182)
Please use the tags LB492 and LB492Week12Post.
