HAD-458 Afro-Fantastic: Visualizing Contemporary Black Imaginaries

3 Credits

This course explores the Afro-Fantastic as an aesthetic and theoretical framework for examining the liberatory possibilities of blackness in this contemporary moment. ‘Afro-Fantastic’ is a term that loosely assembles creative modalities of blackness including Afro-Futurism, Afro Surrealism, Afro-Punk, and Afro-Gothic. With a focus on the transnational African Diaspora, this class offers a generous understanding of how the Middle Passage, chattel slavery, and its afterlives have brutalized black populations, especially in the New World. As such, the fantastic is often a recalibration of a denied humanity that reconfigures as a parahumanity manifesting through self-fashioning and burgeoning epistemologies.