Topics in African American Culture & Life: Black Speculative Fiction and The Black Radical Imagination

In this course, students will engage the archive of contemporary Black speculative fiction and Black studies scholarship to interrogate the possibilities and limits of the Black radical imagination as it appears in fantasy, horror, graphic fiction, and other genres. Students will read narrative fiction written after the Black Arts Movement to interrogate what the speculative offers in terms of thinking about Black worlds. The course argues that speculative writing-narrative fiction and theoretical writing-gesture to other social and political modes of thinking about and being in the world.