Postcolonial Speculative Fiction

Introduction to the Project

Pictured above: The class, each of us holding his or her favorite book from the syllabus.
 
The main content of this Scalar book is the blogs of students participating in Eng410: Postcolonial Speculative Fiction at Coker College. This course is divided into four sections:
  1. Introduction--a look at some basic texts that set up postcolonial issues (othering, hybridity, mimicry and types of colonialism) and speculative fiction (Afrofuturism, worldbuilding and asking "what if?").
  2. Petrofiction--a unit that examines petroculture (gas and oil culture) in relation to speculative fiction narratives concerning oil companies' economic imperialism and environmental destruction. Other texts reflect the scarcity of fuel in developing countries and the ways that scarcity influences their transportation, their economies and their ecology. Because petrofiction is a particular focus because of an article that a student and I are writing, many of these blogs focus on the relationship between the West's gas and oil culture and the ways that Western companies' economic dominance are played out in African nations and the Caribbean.
  3. Other Worlds--a unit that focuses on world-building in postcolonial speculative fiction. Texts demonstrate the ways that authors can interrogate colonial histories and the modern world by placing them in an "elsewhere." Most of these texts ground their new worlds in one that reflects West African or Caribbean cultures that were almost destroyed by slavery and racism.
  4. Monsters--a unit that explores  the ways the metaphors of monsters play out in texts about colonialism, identity, hybridity and slavery.
  5. Steampunk--a unit that uses alternate histories to understand colonial encounters and imagine narratives of empowerment of the colonized, the dispossessed and people of the African diaspora.

Petrocultures

In our investigation of Petrofiction, we were lucky to have a visiting exhibit by Kathleen Thum, "OilWorks" in Coker's Cecelia Coker Bell Gallery. Thum's art "aims to disrupt and interfere with our expectations of how one experiences oil in our western world." One class was held in the gallery, where we discussed Nnedi Okorafor's Lagoon among Thum's art. 

Themes

Beyond the expressly colonial and petrocultural themes discussed above. The students tracked these broad themes as well.
  1. Hybridity
  2. Hair
  3. Echoes of Slavery and Jim Crow
  4. Spiders and Storytelling
  5. Water and Water Deities
  6. Language

How to Use This Website

Follow the Contents below to learn about the course. Use the Table of Contents button (top left) to follow the writing of individual students or writing by theme (coming soon).

Contents of this path:

This page has replies:

  1. Thank you all so much for compiling this site. It's such a great resource for students new to postcolonial studies and speculative fiction. I intend to share it with some of my own students at the University of Missouri.

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