Motivation to Teach Social Action:
I'm hoping to help my students become advocates and allies for minority groups represented in the literature I teach. By engaging with Black science fiction that explores power struggles, reimagines futures, and disrupts mainstream narratives, students can develop critical perspectives on social justice issues and learn pathways to meaningful action.
Course Description:
Black science fiction centers the interrogation of power, the fight for freedom, and the reimagination of Black existence in speculative worlds. Black science fiction poses this central question: If Black folks had power, how would they wield it? The genre interrogates power, not as a tool for control, conquest, or dominance but as a force for justice and collective transformation.
In this course, we will examine Black science fiction as a genre that explores power struggles, disrupts mainstream science fiction and reinvents its tropes, reimagines the future, while engaging with different futures (including Afrofuturism, Africanfuturism, Pan-AfricanFuturism) and endless possibilities of new worlds shaped by resilience and hope in the face of adversity and trauma.
Taught By:
Omotoyosi Odukomaiya
Assistant Professor,
English Department
Hope College
Read profile here.