Image: ZORA! Festival's Kimberly Williams (left), a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Florida, interviewed Dr. Isiah Lavender III at the 2020 Afrofuturism Conference on Jan. 29, 2020. Image credit: Dr. Scot French

Welcome to Week 4 of the ZORA! Festival 2020-2021 Afrofuturism Course!

Please begin by reviewing About the Course for an introduction and orientation to the 2020-2021 Afrofuturism Syllabus, which bridges the organizing themes of the first two years of the five-year Afrofuturism Conference Cycle: "What is Afrofuturism?" and "What is the Sound of Afrofuturism?"

Note: Each week the course coordinator will release new content related to the conference themes. Content posted here will remain publicly accessible and may be incorporated into other courses, in part or in full, via links to this site. Suggested citation: French, Scot. Syllabus for ZORA! Festival Afrofuturism Course, University of Central Florida, Orlando, Fall 2020-Spring 2021. STARS, https://stars.library.ucf.edu/afrofuturism_syllabus_about/.

Conversations

In the Conversations segment we share resources featuring participants in the 2020-2021 ZORA! Festival Afrofuturism Conference.

This week's featured Conversation is a podcast interview with Dr. Isiah Lavender III, one of the keynote speakers at the 2020 ZORA! Festival Afrofuturism Conference and a leading scholar of Literary Afrofuturism.

Dr. Lavender is the Sterling Goodman Professor of English at the University of Georgia. He is the author of several books, including Race and American Science Fiction (Indiana University Press, 2011) and Afrofuturism Rising: The Literary Prehistory of a Movement (Ohio State University Press, 2019). Current works include the co-edited collections Literary Afrofuturism in the Twenty-First Century and the Routledge Handbook to Literary Futurisms and his monograph-in-progress, Critical Race Theory and Science Fiction.

The interview was conducted by Kimberly Williams, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Florida, during the ZORA! Festival Afrofuturism Conference on Jan. 30, 2020. It lasts about 30 minutes.

You can find the interview here.

Explorations

In the Explorations segment we pose a series of questions for further investigation and class discussion, based on the featured Conversation. As you listen to the podcast interview with Dr. Lavender, consider the following questions:

• How did Dr. Lavender's "racial awakening" in grade school spark his interest in science fiction and Afrofuturism?
• Dr. Lavender describes Afrofuturism as "science fictional blackness." What does he mean by that? How (in a literary-metaphorical sense) might the African American experience, from the slave trade to the present, resemble a science fiction plot?
• Is Afrofuturism inherently hopeful/utopian? Does Afrofuturism allow for Afropessimism?
• Dr. Lavender lauds Zora Neale Hurston as an "active agent" of Afrofuturism. Where, in his view, might one find evidence of Afrofuturism in her work? What can Afrofuturist writers learn from her?

References

Authors, artists, and works referenced in the podcast include:

• Mark Dery, "Black to the Future: Interviews with Samuel R. Delany, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose," in Dery, ed. Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture (Duke University Press, 1994)
• Isiah Lavender III, Race in American Science Fiction (2011)
• Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles (1950)
• Star Wars (1977) - Greedo character
• Milestone Media -- Hardware, Static, Blood Syndicate, Icon
• Virgil Ovid Hawkins of Static
• Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)
• Richard Wright's Native Son (1940)
• John A. Williams' Captain Blackman (1972)
• Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845)
• Ishmael Reed, Flight to Canada (1976)
• John Akomfrah's Last Angel of History (Black Audio Film Collective, 1996)
• Clppng, "The Deep" (Sub Pop Records, 2019)
• Kodwo Eshun's work
• Samuel R. Delaney's Dahlgren (1975) or Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (1984)
• Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower (1993)
• Nalo Hopkinson, Brown Girl in the Ring (1998)
• Outkast (hip hop duo, 1990s)
• Marvel Studios' Black Panther film (2018)

Next week: An interview with Dr. Reynaldo Anderson, Associate Professor of Communications at Harris-Stowe State University and a keynote speaker at the ZORA! Festival's 2020 Afrofuturism Conference.