The History of Afrofuturism--An online course enrolling for Feb. 2021

Hi all,

 

I'd like to put on your radar an online seminar-style course that may be of interest:

 

The History of Afrofuturism – February 11–March 4, 2021; Thursdays, 6–8pm ET; 4 online class sessions over a period of 4 weeks; enrollment is open but limited to the first 20 students.

 

Course description: The term “Afrofuturism,” coined in the 1990s, describes a literary, musical, and visual aesthetic that draws on futuristic tropes to explore African diasporic issues, utopian visions, alienation, and Black history. Afrofuturism is today widely recognized as a genre; figures like Sun Ra and Samuel Delany are understood as the musical and literary progenitors of the 1960s interplanetary aesthetics, while contemporary films like Black Panther and artists like Solange and FKA Twigs reach popular audiences.

 

However, in this course we will hit rewind, studying lesser-known invocations of planetary time, speculative futures, and alternative worlds by Black writers of the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. We will center on three historical and cultural loci: (1) mid-century abolition (essays); (2) post-Civil War women’s writing (poetry); and (3) turn-of the-century and modernist fiction (short stories). We will explore the ways that, like contemporary Afrofuturism, earlier uses of the planetary in Black thought expressed alienation, considered belonging and possibility, and articulated a revolutionary immanence. Among the writers we will encounter are Martin Delany, Phillis Wheatley, Frances Harper, Charles Chesnutt, Pauline Hopkins, and W.E.B. Du Bois. Our goal will be to trace a history of Afrofuturist thought across different forms of cultural production. Read more here: https://borderlinesopenschool.org/courses/p/afrofuturism

 

This course is hosted by a new nonprofit initiative, Borderlines Open School for Advanced Cross-Cultural Studies, which aims to offer the general public, students, teachers, and professors alike affordable opportunities for engaging with and developing advanced and creative scholarship outside of the usual university system, as well as to ethically pay and support all of their instructors, recognizing their intellectual and pedagogical labor as valuable work that matters. To learn more about this new initiative, please see their FAQs.

 

All best,

Meghan Vicks (mvicks@borderlinesfoundation.org)