Archive for afropessmism

Course materials for Black Feminist Speculative Fiction

Posted in Teaching with tags , , , , , on 12 January 2021 by Ben

People on Twitter asked for the course materials for my upcoming Multicultural Literature class on Black Feminist Speculative Fiction, so here it is.

I wish there was a more coherent narrative to the course, but I realized how little time I left myself for getting it ready and rather than try to make it perfect I just tried to work in all of the materials I wanted to get to.

We are not really reading much on genre, although this is course on genre in many respects. Rather than focusing on how genres have been defined, largely by white critics and scholars, we will be looking at how black women have revised genre and how black feminists have set the stage for discussion of these revisions and their place within generic, national, and world histories. I wanted to include only women writers, but did wind up including three secondary texts by black men, from Wilderson, Eshun, and Sarr, because of how they introduce three topics crucial for the class (Afropessimism, Afrofuturism, and African modernity).

That all said, I think it came out pretty well. Here are the docs:

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