Module description
This module explores the current boom in Afrofuturism in various narrative forms, examining what looks like a recent movement from a long, historical view. It demonstrates the longstanding potency that speculative genres (folktale, magic/animist realism, fantasy, sci-fi) have carried for imagining African futures where African-originating people are masters, rather than victims, of modernity. While the module traces the development of the concept of Afrofuturism in a Pan-African context (bringing attention to texts such as W.E. B. Dubois's sci-fi short story 'The Princess Steel', Octavia Butler's Dawn, and Courttia Newland's Cosmogramma), the module focuses on the African continent's past and current offerings, looking at how, in literature and film primarily, but also popular music and art, supernatural and animist notions interface with modern and future technologies. We will consider what the varying apertures of concepts such as Africanfuturism, Africanjujuism, and Black speculative writing offer as we view the module's creative texts through a lens of 'Planetary' Afrofuturism (as per Sophia Samatar). The module highlights texts translated from African-language original publications and films in order to emphasize the significance of cultural anchoring with specific African contexts for imagining future potentials. The reading list will comprise primary texts from a mix of genres, which are likely to include the following: fiction (DuBois, Butler, and Newland), folktales (Rattray's collected Akan-Ashanti Folk-tales), films (Akomfrah and George's The Last Angel ofHistory, Kahiu's Pumzi, Diop's Atlantics, Williams and Uzeyman's musical Neptune Frost), music (SunRa's Space is the Place), and visual art in several of the above. We will discuss these texts alongside critical and theoretical texts on concepts such as necro politics, black speculative arts, animism, the Anthropocene,the cyborg, African post crisis, and black surrealism. The module assessment includes a seminar presentation, with an option for students to produce a creative work, with the aim of encouraging student-led knowledge production
Assessment details
Presentation (15%) and one x 2,000 word end-semester essay (85%)
Educational aims & objectives
This module will introduce students to, and equip them to articulate, key debates surrounding Afrofuturism as a counter-discourse to African negation-debates such as race as a technological invention, the tension between decolonization and cosmopolitanism, genre in relation to high art, and Pan-Africanism in the face of regional particularity.
In addition to developing their writing and research skills through the 2000-word essay, students will gain instruction in how to deliver an effective presentation, including how to use tools like Powerpoint effectively, how to adjust an essay for oral delivery, and how to perform in a question-and-answer forum. If a student is unable to deliver the presentation, they will be given an alternative assessment in the form of a 1000-word essay.
Learning outcomes
By the end of the module, students will be able to demonstrate intellectual, transferable, and practicable skills appropriate to a Level 5 module and in particular will be able to:
- Contextualize Afrofuturistic popular culture within its socio-economic and historical framework, beginning in America and extending into the Caribbean and Africa.
- Apply central theoretical texts from popular African popular arts studies, African philosophy, critical race theory, cultural studies, and aesthetic theory to literary texts and film.
- Communicate reading and research effectively, through oral presentations and discussion.
- Develop and sustain an argument, drawing on appropriate resources (to be demonstrated through the final essay).
Teaching pattern
Weekly one hour lecture and one hour seminars