Instructor: Smaran Dayal

Since the premiere of the Marvel blockbuster movie Black Panther in 2018, the genre of Afrofuturism or Black science fiction has become an integral part of mainstream American popular culture and public intellectual debate. However, even as Black Panther has experienced this unprecedented box-office success and enthusiastic worldwide reception, something that continues to receive less attention—and at times even goes unnoticed—are this genre’s literary roots. This course offers a robust introduction to Afrofuturism in literature, film, TV, and critical discourse. We will look at the definitional debates around Afrofuturism in texts such as: Mark Dery’s Black to the Future (1994) and Ytasha Womack’s essays on Afrofuturism; the novels and short stories of Samuel Delany and Octavia Butler; the films of Jordan Peele; recent Black speculative TV series such as Lovecraft Country; and contemporary literary and cultural criticism on Afro-diasporic science fiction. In particular, this course will raise questions of form and genre: What is speculative or science fiction? What kinds of cultural and political critique does Afrofuturism make possible that realist and modernist forms cannot? Likewise, we will turn to histories of settler colonialism, slavery, indigeneity, and racism in the Americas, and inquire into the ways in which Afrofuturist literature activates and reframes these histories in ways that other genres have not—or cannot.

Instructor: Christina Chalmers

Transmission: “sending across”, transfer, passage, passing, conveyance, mediation. The millennium bug, radio transmitters in Honduras installed by the United Fruit company, secret codes, private and public languages, the colonial standard of English, the taboo on cruising, needles in bathrooms in the 1990s, fibre-optic cables, liquid crystals, radio waves, the writing of wills, mimesis and reproduction, broadcasts. These are some few of the associations that come to mind when thinking about “transmission”, above and beyond the recent uptake of the word during the pandemic. The recent period has exemplified how lines of transmission order space and time. The pandemic has re-ordered the private and public, the relations between permitted and forbidden spaces, and the global movements of the economy, in an effort to stave off the transmission of Sars-Cov-2, with closures following its transmission patterns. But other forms of transmission – such as the transmission of wealth, assets and property in the family, as well as cultural and group belonging – have long ordered the sequencing of time, and the ways this is anticipated and experienced. The necessity for the instantaneous transmission of data across large spaces – via fibre-optic cables and the liquid crystals in screens – organises material and digital worlds. This course looks at the history of the concept of transmission, through its reference to media history – in radio, TV and mechanical reproduction (print, photography) – but also its varied reference to viral contagion, psychoanalysis, linguistics and lines of property transmission within forms of kinship such as the nuclear family. The course seeks to interpret its objects through an analysis of gender, and to probe the “symptoms” of transmissions – or the lack of symptoms in the enigma of so-called “asymptomatic” transmissions – that subtend our lives. The necessity to balance between the withdrawal from lines of circulation, the refusal to transmit or be transmitted to – remaining “pure”, safe and uncontaminated by outside influences because of the perils of infection, invasion, or corruption – and the need to communicate and copy, forming lines of “transfer” and passage, play out in many different spheres. The course will touch on dynamics of family-building, colonial imposition, pandemic responsiveness, theories of reproduction, and TV wavelengths. We will seek to build a multivalent understanding of the concept, showing both its theorisation and material history.

Instructor: Ârash Aminian Tabrizi

“Who are you?” Here is the question that one—you, she, they, or I—is asked every day, everywhere. Be it on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter, or on dating and hook-up apps such as Tinder, Grindr, Hinge, and Her, be it in university applications and job interviews, in artistic practices and journalistic productions, or else when it comes to political activism and the moral values attached to it, one indeed has to introduce themselves, to say and show who (or perhaps what) they are as legibly and recognisably as possible. However, these expressions of the self often fall short of conveying, through their formatted forms, the complexity of what (or who) is being expressed, to the point of becoming mere cliché. Such commonplace narratives and images one shares with the world in turn shape one’s self and one’s relationships with others and the world that thereby become experientially poorer. This formatting, which some learn and excel at, remains for many unconscious, anchored as they are in the belief that they communicate the truth of their selves. This class, instead of studying the “self” as a stable and easily definable entity, will look at cultural productions in which a form is given to express its inherent multifacetedness, its fundamental scattering in time, space, life, death, sensation, sex, language, history, nature, etc. To do so, besides some theoretical texts (Agamben, Améry, Wendy Brown, Freud, Lyotard, Marie Moran, Gayle Rubin), we will examine the ways in which the shattering of the self comes to be formed and rendered, often experimentally, in short stories (Blanchot, Lispector), several novellas and novels (Beckett, Büchner, Carson, Cixous, Guibert, Rawicz, Sartre, Juliana Spahr), a screenplay (Duras), an autobiographical account (Wojnarowicz), poetry collections and poems (Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Toi Derricotte, Eve Ewing, Rob Halpern, Canisia Lubrin, Diana Khoi Nguyen, Percy B. Shelley), an interactive graphic novel (Marietta Ren), a few speculative essays (Derrida, Haraway, Saidiya Hartman, Lacoue-Labarthe, Nancy), and a couple of albums (Björk, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds). Students will have the chance to produce a creative project of their own that could be autobiographical or not, fictional or not, and that could resort to any modes and mediums of expression they see fit.