Introduction to the Project
- 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?").
- 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.
- 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.
- Monsters--a unit that explores the ways the metaphors of monsters play out in texts about colonialism, identity, hybridity and slavery.
- 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
