ENG31940 Global Science Fiction

Academic Year 2021/2022

“Who more sci-fi than us?” asks Junot Díaz’s narrator in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, characterizing the historical experience of Antilleans in the Caribbean as marked by all the tropes of science fiction: from alien invasion, to apocalyptic species extinctions, to radical environmental transformation. The past two decades have seen an explosion of speculative fiction from the Global South, taking up sf film director Alex Rivera’s call for a “science fiction from below” that imagines the future not from the perspective of Los Angeles, London, or Washington, D.C., but rather from Mexico, the Caribbean, India, and Africa. This module will examine contemporary short stories, novels, film and media from speculative fiction writers and artists from postcolonies across the world, including the Caribbean, Africa, and India, as well as Afro-futurist and Latinx writers from the US.

We will draw on critical frameworks including world-literary criticism, postcolonial ecocriticism, and energy humanities in order to explore how these fictions foreground problems of race, class, and gender in relation to the legacies of (neo)colonial domination, uneven development and resource imperialism, and the challenges of planetary environmental crisis as they are experienced across the Global South. We will examine a range of emergent genres such as cli-fi and eco-punk in relation to climate change, and investigate how global speculative fiction often combines or hybridizes aesthetics from different cultural contexts and genres, including magical realism, hard science fiction, the fantastic, and literary realism, in order to construct their counter-hegemonic visions of the future.