Lavender, Isiah
R 3 :30 PM
Park Hall 0067
ENGL 8720: Seminar in African American Studies [CRN48376]
Critical Race Theory and Science Fiction
COURSE DESCRIPTION: SF often presents a monochrome vision of the future where white people are the only ones that matter. I am basing this course on the analogy between the principle, articulated by Critical Race Theory, that American law is influenced by a culture in which the reality of racial difference is subsumed by a default whiteness, and the tradition in SF that situates white people as the default standard of what it is to be a people. With a CRT focus, we will examine the Afrofuturist wave of recent science fiction and tease out themes of imprisonment, medical experimentation, unequal education, segregated environments, hostile policing, and racial violence against the many backdrops of science fiction—alternate history, dystopia, apocalypse, zombies, space opera, climate change, and cyberpunk (did I mention zombies?).
Because CRT dates back to about 1976, most of our primary texts will be from the 21st century. In the first four class periods of the course, we will focus exclusively on secondary texts related to different aspects of CRT to create the necessary critical context and intellectual basis with which to justify the application of CRT to SF in its portrayal of race and racism. During the fifth class period, we will have a crash course in science fiction by reading either Sherryl Vint’s Science Fiction: A Guide for the Perplexed or David Seed’s Science Fiction: A Very Short Introduction. And class periods six through fifteen, we will be reading black American SF exclusively and we will apply what we have learned about CRT to SF in the production of the seminar paper.
You will discover that SF provides an allegorical mirror for the social and political anxieties and agendas of the day— the post-race era, civil rights, viral pandemics, climate change, terrorism, black lives matter, the #me too movement, etc. Our job is to discover what these anxieties and agendas are in the texts we’re reading as they relate to race and racism—and gender and class to a smaller extent—and to fully engage with them. Each of the novels chosen function as case studies that reflect, record, and reveal the cultures and systems that produced them in the first place, and these texts in turn influence us, opening us to new and future ways of being in our world that may exist somewhere over the horizon. This is why representation truly matters for marginalized people and has real-world meaning.