Postcolonial Speculative Fiction

Other Course Media

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie "The Danger of a Single Story" 

Description from TED:
Our lives, our cultures, are composed of many overlapping stories. Novelist Chimamanda Adichie tells the story of how she found her authentic cultural voice -- and warns that if we hear only a single story about another person or country, we risk a critical misunderstanding.


 


Maxamed Sharmarke, "A Railway Map" 

This map is an attempt; a lame attempt at appropriating a technology associated with the opulence of old Europe and putting it in the periphery, in this case Somali inhabited regions of Africa. In a country that symbolizes to the world most dramatically the depths of which the post colonial dream of unity turned into a nightmare of discord. Continued here.

 

Walter Dinjos, "Being Dada in Igboland"

In Igbo land, it is believed that children born dada are of spiritual origin – the dark side – and are possessed because their mothers visited shrines and made pacts with deities to conceive them. And I am dada. Continued here.


Ytasha Womack "Afrofuturism: Imagination and Humanity"

The use of the imagination for self-development and social change is one of the greatest tenets of Afrofuturism. Ytasha L. Womack will explore the resilience encouraged through the championing of the imagination, the tensions that arise through embracing hope, the separation of humanity from itself through the creation of the technology called race, and the power of storytelling. Womack is an author, filmmaker, independent scholar and dancer. She is author of the award winning book Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci Fi & Fantasy Culture. She is one of the leading Afrofuturist scholars and travels the world lecturing on the imagination.

Nalo Hopkinson, "Code Sliding"

From the Essay: "Part of what I set out to do was to imagine what paradigms for technology a society might develop without the all-pervasive influence of American technology and the way it references Greek and Roman mythology (we talk about the "Apollo missions;" we've named planets after Greek and Roman gods; we call our cities "metropolises"). But a diasporic Caribbean culture might name its computer operating systems after a West African deity with the power to go anywhere, see anything. Its concepts of stewardship of its planet might be based in Taino values (the Taino are the indigenous people who were living in the Caribbean when Columbus stumbled on that part of the world)."

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