Race. Identity and Memory in Lovecraft Country: A Conversation (Part Two)

Kyu Hyun Kim: Among the strengths of Lovecraft Country as Shawn discusses I was particularly taken by depiction of the series's black characters as organic intellectuals per Gramsci. This observation led me to think about how Asian Americans have been presented in the US mainstream genre works. While there are plenty of occasions for associating Asian Americans with "book-smart" qualities and with technological expertise or academic knowledge, I doubt that these stereotypes really function the way you recognize as organic intellectuals. More often than not, the "book-smart" qualities are merely there to highlight social akwardness or bodily weaknesses. It gets even more complicated when the weight of the US-centered historical perspective (left-anti-imperialist or right-American-Exceptionalist) is added to a character: Hiro from Heroes, for instance.

Shawn's piece also returns me to one of my initial questions, which is how do we make use out of a profoundly racist or otherwise deeply problematic classic source that nonetheless has become greatly influential and remain alluring for the creatives? Would you say that Lovecraft Country basically evades this issue by merely appropriating cultural capital of the author's name? The series was not convincing to me as a critique of the racism underlying the Lovecraftian mythos, provided that it was ever intended as such. The fury of Christine who got excluded from the Order of Adam because of her gender seems to have received a greater attention, and then that angle also seems to become curiously defused as the series reaches its resolution. Where is the equivalent of Nyarlatothep or Fungi from Yuggoth, rethought and transformed in the manner African-American characters were in this series? Maybe we don't need them at all, but then again, this somehow leaves me vaguely cheated: was the series's end somehow meant to suggest the critical inversion of Lovecraft's racism? If so, I still remain unconvinced.

Sorry this is really so incoherent and all over the place. But in any case thank you Shawn for your great thought piece!

Shawn Taylor: Something that Kyu Hyun’s brilliant excavating of Love Country sparked in me is the many ways Asians and Pacific Islanders exist as the every and no-things of (I’ll generically call) the genres of the fantastic. But we’ll get to that. 

I agree with Kyu Hyun that there was little Lovecraft in Lovecraft Country. It makes me wonder if the disconnect was in the LC novel—a book written by a white man, attempting to tell a horror story centering on a Black family; or the adaptation by Black creatives from the source material—in either case, the lack of real Lovecraftian cosmic horror felt like a distorted minor key. It was instantly recognizable, but this false note engendered questions instead of dismissal of the work. At least for me. To see the twin horror of racism and monsters, in the same work, was a revelation—despite some of the plot holes, lip service to every genre, and the blatant omission of a resolution of the most fascinating relationship in the entire series, that of Ruby and Christina.

Their relationship and its Cronenbergian body-horror dynamics could have been an entire series, unto itself. This relationship also brings to the fore questions that always arise when considering shapeshifters: what is racial phenotype and sex to one who can change those qualities? There were a lot of intriguing questions left on the table. Alas. I’ll stick a pin in this, for now. 

 Before the episode, “Meet Me in Daegu”, I had only a passing familiarity with Korea, it’s politics, or its mythology. In the West, in my experience, especially in the States, there is a mashing together of Asian cultures. Not in a useful, transcultural way that highlights exchange, mutual influence, and the very real specter of colonization—but of laziness. No other word for it. Asian, instead of taking the time to explore what this means, becomes a catchall, something to affix as a label without having to do any more exploration.

So, when the Kumiho was introduced, I became angry (through my ignorance) because I thought they’d injected the Japanese Kitsune into the narrative. I couldn’t tell my fox spirits apart. This is a major problem with Asian culture and the Asian diaspora, as understood in the West; unless you’re a scholar, all of the cultures become Asian. No Japanese, no Chinese, no Korean, not Taiwanese, just Asian. Granted, it’s up to us to investigate and gain clarity, but the with the all and nothingness of Asian culture, as it is presented in media, it makes it difficult. 

I first thought about this with Star Trek. As a lifelong fan, I have to fully agree with Kyu Hyun’s assessment that Trek has tokenized not only Asian people (despite George Takei’s Sulu being a revolutionary character, for his time) but Asian cultures as well. The Vulcans and the Romulans seemed to occupy Asian allegorical space, seen through the lens of ill-informed exoticism. Years later, Joss Whedon’s Firefly was not only more glaring and grating than Trek, but more blatantly offensive. The entire show mythology was that there are two cultural cores: One Western and one “Pan-Asian.” The show is peppered with a kind of Chinese-language pidgin, bland and generic Asian characters, symbols, modes of dress—but the show is essentially Space Confederates cosplaying Asian (no particular Asian, ostensibly Chinese, but never firmly verified) but with no Asians of note in the series’ thirteen episode run.

This is the everything and no-thingness I mentioned. The idea and cultural trappings of an Asian society is all around, but Asian people are thoroughly erased. This is why I felt “Meet me in Daegu” was so powerful. 

Outside of M.A.S.H. and the Phillip Rhee starring martial arts film franchise, Best of the Best, I never encountered too much of anything that related to Korea. I had a Korean friend in high school, Myung, but we could only be friends at school because I was Black (American) and his parents would not allow me in his home. After seeing what Korean’s went through during the Fatherland Liberation War/Six-Two-Five depicted in LC, seeing Atticus casually murder and instill fear—and then pine after Ji-Ah—I could understand (not justify) their not wanting me for company. I had two Black Korean war veterans I knew watch this episode and asked them to tell me what they thought about Atticus’ scenes. One refused to tell me anything and the other, through what I interpreted as tears on the telephone, told me that those scenes were mild. It gave my more insight into Myung’s family’s experience. 

Lovecraft Country humanized the Koreans living under occupation and illustrated the ‘just doing my job’ cruelty space American soldiers occupied—something most people in the U.S. are wholly unfamiliar with. We’ve been told North Korea is an oppressive state with wacky leaders and South Korea is a hub of technology and boy/girl band factory. That’s it. But being introduced to a more accurate portrayal of Korean life under wartime conditions, and getting a glimpse of Korean folk/mythic life forces us to see just how much heavy-lifting “Meet Me in Daegu” tried to do and how much further the image industry has to go.] 

Kye Hyun Kim: Thank you so much, Shawn, for a wonderful, super-stimulating and deeply moving response to what I have written. The passage about your conversations with the old African-American veterans of the Cold War was so powerful that I had to literally get up from my seat and pace around the room for some minutes before I could sit down again. So many things went through my mind, including the very real specter of Korean racism-- a people as fiercely nationalistic and ethnocentric as any in the world-- toward the people of color, specifically against the mixed-blood children fathered during the Korean War. Your comments gave me a renewed appreciation of just how far the creators of Lovecraft Country did push the envelope in terms of destabilizing the accepted imageries of Asians and Koreans in the American media.

Kyu Hyun Kim, Associate Professor History at University of California-Davis, was born in Seoul, Korea. He received his Ph.D. in history and East Asian languages in 1997 from Harvard University. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Edwin O. Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies at Harvard University (1996-1997), served a Japan Society for Promotion of Science Fellowship, and was nominated and sponsored in the United States by the Japan Advisory Board, Social Science Research Council in 2000. He is the author of the forthcoming book, Treasonous Patriots: Collaboration and the Colonial Modernity in Modern Korean History and Culture.

Shawn Taylor is one of the founders of Nerds of Color and a founding organizer of the Black Comix Arts Festival, a festival that highlights and promotes artists on the margins of the mainstream comic book industry. Shawn recently published a white paper, We The Fans: How Our Powers Can Change the World, as a Senior Fellow for the Pop Culture Collaborative.

Race, Identity and Memory in Lovecraft Country: A Conversation (Part One)

Over the next two installments, I will continue my focus on some of the most discussed television dramas of 2020 with a conversation between Kyu Hyun Kim (a historian of South Korean politics and culture) and Shawn Taylor (one of the founders of Nerds of Color), about Lovecraft Country. These two writers explore the ways this remarkable series broke with earlier representations of Koreans and African-Americans in the horror and fantasy genre. My own sense was that the series took swing for the fences risks that sometimes paid off and sometimes didn’t, but that it was crammed full of provocative ideas that will shape my thinking for sometime to come. In some ways, it was more successful at the level of individual episodes, which made provocative interventions in a range of horror subgenres, rather than at the level of the serial, which was a bit incoherent up till the end and opened much that it failed to resolve. But we don’t need to see a series as perfect to find it sparks conversation as this and the next blog post illustrate.

Kyu Hyun Kim: Some parts of HBO’s Lovecraft Country has left me breathlessly excited and well-nigh speechless due to its sheer political audacity as well as pleasures derived from its crazy blending of different subgenres and styles— Afro-futurism, Gothic horror conventions, film noir— even when the cake mix sometimes does not quite rise as expected. Other parts of the series— thankfully minor in proportion— turned out ultimately disappointing for various reasons: the rather listless denouement rehabilitating that hoary cliché of a Christian patriarch sacrificing himself for the community, a non-resolution of the relationship between Ruby and Christina, for my money the most intriguing couple in the whole series, the curiously lackadaisical depictions of Lovecraftian monsters (is that multi-ocular, many-toothed thing supposed to be… Shoggoth?) and so on. In the end, though, I have little problem praising historical awareness, innovative approach and genre-savvy chutzpah of the showrunner Misha Green, who wrote the majority of episodes as well. 

For me, a South Korean genre enthusiast as well as a teacher of Korean culture and history, the big “uh-oh” moment arrived when the series segued into Episode Six, “Meet Me in Daegu,” devoted to the unspooling of the backstory between the protagonist Atticus (Jonathan Majors) and the Korean nurse Ji-ah (Jaimie Chung), during the Korean War. The images of idiotically grinning Asian men clad in loose pants and cotton jackets from M. A. S. H. and other too-awful-to-mention “representations of Koreans in American TV” passed through my head, but only for a moment. I told myself, OK, this is 2020. A South Korean film won the Best Picture Oscar only a few months ago, for God’s sake. I probably will not see a degrading Korean character speaking in pidgin English (unless such a speech pattern was integral to that character). I also probably will not see a generic Oriental landscape and 19th century Chinese houses standing in for Daegu, one of the major cities in South Korea and its very name fraught with historical and cultural implications, as “Chicago” or “New Orleans” would be for Americans. I also admit that I was intrigued to find out how Ji-ah as a Korean woman, living in ‘50s during the height of Cold War no less, would be portrayed. Would she disappointingly turn out to be just another token Asian presence, in the way multiple iterations of (with apologies to some Trekker friends I admire and respect) Star Trek have always treated “real” Asians (rather than Vulcans and Romulans “standing in” for Asians)? 

The verdict: it was significantly better than I expected. Not that the show got all period, historical and cultural details right: of course not. But overall, the episode was ambitious in the right ways and obviously trying to break new grounds, some of them in relation to depictions of East Asian cultures in the American TV, others in terms of recognizing with clear eyes the presence of US imperialism and horrible treatment of women by the hyper-masculine state (war regimes) in both Korea and the US. This adventurous attitude was in all honesty far better than being timidly "safe" by the contemporary standards of identity politics. 

And I was right: approximately sixty percent or so of the dialogue was in Korean. Of course, it would have been really great, and instantly impressed many Korean viewers, had Green and others paid a bit more attention to the Korean language and got Ji-ah and her mother to speak in Daegu dialect. Moreover, the episode in my opinion also displayed some evidence of the production crew or writers having studied the Korean horror and dark fantasy of the past two decades. The kumiho (nine-tailed fox) myth is probably one of the most frequently exploited subject matter for Korean horror/dark fantasy genre, and the Lovecraft Country team manages to mine its subtext of gender politics, an approach very much in tune with the evolution of the myth in New Korean Cinema as well as South Korean TV dramas. A bit head-scratching part was depicting the “nine tails” of Ji-ah the werefox as disgusting tentacular organs snaking out of various orifices of her body: a smart student of mine opined that this was perhaps influenced by the “tentacular” obsessions of some adult-oriented Japanese anime, which has little to do with the Korean myth. 

More importantly, the episode was critically reflective about American Cold War imperialism in the way that I have seldom seen in stateside productions. For some American viewers, hopefully it would have been jarring to see the hero Atticus presented as a cold-blooded torturer and executioner "just doing his job," then turn all gooey-romantic to trying to woo Ji-ah. In the similar vein, I was most impressed by the character of Young-ja, a Communist-sympathetic nurse (an excellent performance by Prisca Kim). Her character, morally sensitive and empathetic but also endowed with certain levels of urban sophistication, is very much the kind we would see in recent, notable works of New Korean Cinema dealing with the Korean War or North Korea (such as The Frontline [2011], Swing Kids [2018], The Spy Gone North [2018]) that have managed to humanize North Korean “enemies.” 

The production design was lavish and gorgeous, which is not to say there were no moments that reminded me of a ‘50s black-and-white Samuel Fuller war flick set in the Korean peninsula. Some of the flubs are probably difficult to notice unless you have actually lived in the country proximate to the era depicted. For instance, the Korean subtitles for American movies playing in movie theaters, used to appear vertically, not horizontally, as shown in the episode and today’s Korea. The costumes and sets sometimes have that slightly off-kilter, prefab vibes that might well have been an intended effect. By the way, I did not mind making Ji-ah a fan of Hollywood musicals, especially of Judy Garland. Some Korean viewers might object. It is, I would argue, clearly not a shallow infatuation with a slick American consumerist culture on her part. For this particular point, I hope that South Koreans of today try to recognize the unimaginable allure that old Hollywood could claim for their parents and grandparents.

Ironically, one of the most obvious cliches in the episode was the Korean-American character, Atticus’s buddy, who gives a neat position speech about how he is caught between two (racist) nations and rejected by both sides: these characters often function as an alibi for racial sensitivity on the part of the producers. If Green and others were serious about anti-Asian racism, they should have included the more overt racist treatment of “gooks” by American soldiers. 

Nitpickings aside, I enjoyed the episode (and the whole series) despite its flaws and disappointments. Things have improved much by 2020 but also much remains the same: witness the debacle of Disney sinking hundreds of millions of dollars into making the nauseatingly culturally-and-politically obtuse Mulan, the very raison d’etre of which is egregious pandering to the PRC market and state. I definitely appreciate Green et al.’s boundary-busting gutsiness in Lovecraft Country, which I believe is the greatest strength of the whole episode and the series.

Shawn Taylor: Based on the 2016 novel by Matt Ruff, Lovecraft Country is a television milestone in so many ways. It’s the first horror tv show starring an almost all Black cast that is focused on multiple Black characters, each of the characters have some agency, some stake in the story and all of it wrapped in a prestige television format. This alone should be enough to put it in the running for GOAT status.

But why Lovecraft? How could a virulent racist’s work be used to tell the story of Black folks in the height of the 1950s Jim Crow era United States? While I’m fully on board with the program, there isn’t too much “Lovecraftian Horror” in Lovecraft Country. To be Black in the US, especially before the Civil Rights Movement was in full swing, was to be afraid most of the time. You go to the wrong town, the wrong restaurant, the wrong store and you could be assaulted, assaulted and jailed, or killed. No help would be available. You were completely and utterly on your own. The universe didn’t give one shit about you. I guess the whole ‘uncaring, disinterested universe’ is a Lovecraftian trope. I’ll concede this point. 

The cosmic horror of the Lovecraftian Mythos cannot even hold a candle to the cloak of fear Black folks wore, say, driving from down south up to Chicago, or from Chicago to New England. The quintessentially American activity of the cross-country road trip, something white folks enjoyed as a matter of course, is the starting point of one long episode of hypervigilance, terror, and anxiety for Black folks. So, then, why did Atticus, Letitia, and Uncle George make so many of those trips? Their motivation is why I absolutely fell in love with this show, despite its flaws and glaring plot-holes. 

Running parallel with the horror and magic and swashbuckling adventure that our protagonists were enveloped in were two things rarely afforded Black folks in television and film, especially in the more fantastic genres: intelligence and curiosity. Of course, there have been intelligent Black characters on big and small screen science fiction/horror/fantasy, but rarely are they complete beings. They usually get reduced to being nothing more than exposition drops that spur the main characters to action, or their intelligence is played for comic relief. Lovecraft Country gives us an entirely no presentation of the smart Black character.

I was privy to a preview screening of the first five episodes. After the fifth episode, those in my viewing pod immediately entered into a text conversation about how each and every Black character was smart. Like, really smart. It only got better with the remainder of the series. And it wasn’t like so many other shows where intelligence, especially for Black people, is coded as some kind of disability or impediment (awkward, dispassionate, distant)—or linked to same (See Geordi La Forge from Star Trek: The Next Generation or Dr. Miles Hawkins from M.A.N.T.I.S.). In Lovecraft Country, every Black character, man or woman; gay or straight; old or young; male or female possessed both a keen intelligence and a restless curiosity. And the thing that struck all of us was that there was no explanation for it. 

Unlike Charles Gunn who underwent a procedure to enhance his knowledge of the law and improve how he spoke (aka make him more appealing to white people) in Joss Whedon’s, Angel, the Black venturers of Lovecraft Country were organic intellectuals—we see you Gramsci and Friere. There was no talk of schools or schooling, only literature as an entry point for Atticus, his Uncle George, and his father Montrose; science for Uncle George’s wife, Hippolyta and science and art for their daughter, Diana (not so coincidently the names of Wonder Woman and her mother), and art for Letitia and her sister, Ruby. That they all were able to draw from their respective intellectual bases and curiosities to confront the creeping horror, while engaging in transdisciplinary problem solving, elevated Lovecraft Country above the schlock horror it could have devolved into. 

As a lifelong fan of the fantastic (we see you, Todorov) and the speculative, I have been routinely disappointed by how Black people and Blackness has been portrayed in the genres that fall under these. Blackness is either coded or blatantly offered as evil, or less than, or something that needs to be banished or abolished. What Lovecraft Country does, the reparative work it did, was to give the Black venturers agency in a genre that excludes or dispatches Black people on a regular basis. Not only do the Black protagonists have agency, Black culture, Black folks life is presented not as something other than the norm, but as something loving and mainstream, despite the forces allied against it. 

Lovecraft Country provided us with a Black culture that was tender, affectionate, and a source of strength for the characters. It was a culture that was able to produce intellectuals, curiosity seekers who, through their willingness to engage and utilize knowledge, without bias, were able to save their world and give us ten or so hours of damn fine television. 

Kyu Hyun Kim, Associate Professor History at University of California-Davis, was born in Seoul, Korea. He received his Ph.D. in history and East Asian languages in 1997 from Harvard University. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Edwin O. Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies at Harvard University (1996-1997), served a Japan Society for Promotion of Science Fellowship, and was nominated and sponsored in the United States by the Japan Advisory Board, Social Science Research Council in 2000. He is the author of the forthcoming book, Treasonous Patriots: Collaboration and the Colonial Modernity in Modern Korean History and Culture.

Shawn Taylor is one of the founders of Nerds of Color and a founding organizer of the Black Comix Arts Festival, a festival that highlights and promotes artists on the margins of the mainstream comic book industry. Shawn recently published a white paper, We The Fans: How Our Powers Can Change the World, as a Senior Fellow for the Pop Culture Collaborative.

Back to School: Living Newspapers, Transmedia Operas, and Other Hybrid Media

Yesterday, I shared the syllabus for my PhD seminar, Science Fiction AS Media Theory. Today, I am sharing the syllabus for a class I am co-teaching with a longtime friend and a colleague from the Specialized Journalism Program, Sasha Anawalt. This is going to be Sasha’s last class, since she is retiring, and so we wanted it to be a blow-out, one which stretched both of us (and our students) to think about arts and culture in new ways, especially in the context of the Pandemic, social distancing, Zoom teaching, etc. So, we tapped our respective networks to host a series of conversations with artists, critics, scholars, activists, who are exploring new relations between high and low, between media and everyday life. Our assignments tap the past — living newspapers, Cornell boxes — and the future — speculative journalism. Students are challenged to process the material in conversation with each other through dialogic writing. And there’s a recurring focus on speculative fiction as a set of tools that will allow us to think differently about our current conditions and future possibilities. The students will be early and mid career arts and culture journalisms who are returning for a masters to retool and deepen their thinking. i should note that my syllabi normally list the readings under the topic of the day where-as here, we are listing the readings first and the topic

JOUR 593: Arts Criticism and Commentary

3 units

Spring 2021 – Wednesdays – 2-4:30 p.m.

Instructors: Sasha Anawalt; Henry Jenki

Course Description

Living Newspapers, Transmedia Operas, and Other Hybrid Media Forms

This course looks to the future, asking how we might imagine the world of arts and culture journalism post-COVID-19 pandemic. New forms of expression have emerged during lockdown. Cinema has dimmed its bright lights so that fainter forms of participatory media, such as Twitch or podcasts, have gained greater visibility. Television has lowered technical standards so that international media producers can compete more fully in their marketplace. And fans are restaging their favorite amusement park rides for each other via YouTube as a response to the shutting down of Disneyland for the better part of a year. Virtual choirs of a hundred people sing across the continents from their separate living rooms to your screen. Museums and galleries open “pop-up” shows for fistfuls of viewers at a time. Opera takes place in parking lots with the audience in their cars. Nothing is the same. The relationship between audience and artist is forever changed. The current moment is characterized by the blurring of boundaries between high and low, between different media forms, between different cultural practices. It is further informed by BLM, #MeToo, and the presidential election. 

How might journalists expand their repertoire to incorporate new modes of criticism and reporting which themselves reflect a broader range of media affordances? And how might we understand this cultural churn in relation to earlier moments in the history of arts and entertainment? We will grapple with these questions through conversations with leading creators and thinkers from across the art and entertainment worlds. Guests will range from Disney Imagineers, comic book artists, fan activists, virtual reality producers, and science fiction writers to photographers, assemblage artists, architects, and opera producers, not to mention distinguished arts and culture journalists, who will weigh in and help us explore alternatives such as living newspapers, transmedia opera, and other hybrid forms. Through assignments that include dialogic writing, live performances, and hands-on creative projects, students with work together to produce new journalism possibilities that ideally rise to meet the current cultural moment and move it forward.

 Student Learning Outcomes

·       Learning about influential thinkers and critics in the humanist tradition through classic and contemporary texts, podcasts, and videos – as well as from in-person lectures;

·       Questioning conventional ideas of effective communication and media through DIY collaborative and individual journalism projects;

·       Producing one “living newspaper” team project that exercises and tests the relations between politics and culture;

·       Discovering how connected everything is, and making this manifest through an immersive Joseph Cornell box;

·       Writing on a weekly basis to reinforce the writing habit in a dialogic Blackboard journal;

·       Publishing on Ampersand or other media outlets;

·       Solidifying ideas about your future and the confluence of high and low art, hybrid media, and the ways your journalism can be realized and possibly affect change.

Course Notes

This class will be a combination of lecture/discussion and production workshopping, leaning toward the former with a roster of guests from many arts-related disciplines.We will be talking a lot across the term about fan engagement and participation, and that will require you to talk about what is meaningful to you and be active in most conversations. Come prepared, having done the readings, and open to mentoring one another. You will each introduce at least one speaker.

This course takes place online through Zoom with multimedia and technology-enhanced elements as a likely accompaniment to many of the lectures. The materials will be made available on Blackboard, as will all the reading assignments in a PDF format or via links to e-books and articles.You are responsible for paying attention to the emails we send, and responding in a timely fashion. Likewise, we will respond to yours certainly within 48 hours. If you do not hear from either of us, by all means give us a tap. 

Required Readings and Supplementary Materials

You are required to have the graphic novel adaptation, by Damian Duffy and John Jennings, of Octavia E. Butler’s “Parable of the Sower” (2020), Abrams ComicArts, New York, (ISBN 978-1-4197-3133-4), (265 pages). $25.

We recommend you have:

·      bell hooks, Art on My Mind: Visual Politics, (The New Press, New York, 1995)

·      Henry Jenkins, Comics and Stuff(New York; New York University Press, 2020)

These can be purchased through the USC Bookstore, Amazon, or Bookshop.org.In addition, the USC Library may be able to lend you a copy of Art on My Mindor Comics and Stuff.

All of our other reading materials will be made available to you in PDF form or as links. These will be posted on Blackboard and incorporated in the weekly assignment sheets “handed out” in class via email. Most are in this syllabus under Course Schedule.

Description and Assessment of Assignments 

There are two main projects that you will simultaneously develop and execute over the course of the semester. one of them – which we’re calling “the Joseph Cornell Box” – culminates as a presentation during finals week, in place of a final exam. It is a solo assignment that effectively looks inward. The other, which we will refer to as the Living Newspaper Project, is a group project that looks outward. Both projects are described here in brief, and you can expect fuller details and explanations in class. Both will be graded with a rubric providing a numerical grade that is translated into a letter grade. 

In addition, you will engage in a weekly Dialogic Writing journal exercise on Blackboard, where you and a partner will discuss the class and readings and whatever comes to mind throughout the week (not just in one push right before class). These will be graded at the end of the course. For each missing journal entry, deduct half a letter grade (A becomes A-, etc.) for this specific element of your graded coursework.

CORNELL BOX– The Indo-European root of the word “art” is “to arrange” or “to fit together” (join). This assignment is additive. It begins the first day of class, when you bring in a memory object or what the museum curator and author Nina Simon calls a “social object.”  It’s an object that has a narrative. Its meaning is known to you, and part of this semester-long assignment’s objective is for you to make it have meaning to others. To set it within the context of other objects that you will gather and by “joining” and “arranging” them inside of a box, you will create a world that provokes the viewer to find connections between these objects and create meaning. Worth 20 percent of your final grade.

LIVING NEWSPAPER – This assignment is for a collaborative project, probably in trios or pairs. The objective is to develop a Living Newspaper, which means figuring out a topic or theme that is relevant and of mutual interest. (This could involve improvisation.) It looks to the future. And it must be based on well-reported facts, data, and history. Early on, you will pitch two ideas in 250 words or less. Expect to present one in class. Your theme or topic must relate to the arts or culture, high or low, hybrid or popular, and be about the implications of such social issues as #BLM, anti-racism, #MeToo, diversity and equity in the newsroom, the COVID-19 pandemic, immigration, education, natural resources, the environment, and/or climate change. Your aim is to bring about changes in social behavior and attitudes that could possibly affect the media as a real business and discipline. You will determine the form your Living Newspaper takes. It can be a play, video, dance, stand-up comedy act, comic strip, a 3-D sculpture, or a piece of visual art – it could be on the intersections of food and architecture and an opera chorus. In other words, you are to experiment with form and content, encouraging people to think about the news, using active technologies and materials. Ultimately, you will present this work with your team to the class, in conjunction with a 1,250-word essay authored by you. The essay should provide a critical analysis and understanding of your Living Newspaper. Explain your choices and the background of the work you did as a team. What was your premise? Your thesis? Your objective? Your research? Your process? Finally, why do you think your project will move the needle on social policy and behavior? On the art and artists? On American media? Worth 30 percent of your final grade.

DIALOGIC WRITING– Culture, both high and low, seeks to provoke conversation with a public, but cultural journalism is too often framed as a monologue. This semester, we want students to experiment with collaborative or dialogic forms of writing. You will be assigned a partner at the start of the term (someone who will bring a significantly different background and perspective from your own). Across the term, you will write a weekly series of conversational pieces where the two of you dig into issues which have been raised for you by the course materials, conversations, and experiences, but which will also draw on your own observations about forms of cultural expression in the world around you. These are not crossfire posts; your goal is to explore your differences but also to search for common ground. Each installment should be roughly 1,500 words (i.e. 750-1k words per contributor) and should include more than one round of back and forth exchanges. One of the exchanges must be the speculative journalism project described below which will count for 5 percent of the total for the dialogic writing grade.

SPECULATIVE JOURNALISMmay mean many things, including journalists writing science fiction as a way of exploring what they have learned about how alternative futures might play out. Here, we are using the term to build on the work of the Civic Imagination Project.You will be asked to participate in a world-making workshop conducted by the Civic Imagination team as participants brainstorm their ideal future society of 2060. You are then going to take some of the ideas generated by the workshop and trace down what's happening now which might pave the way for such a future society. This approach combines speculative journalism with citizen-led reporting. We ask that you write a 1,000-word piece on your Dialogic Writing journals, which shares the result of this experiment. Your focus should be on the future of arts and entertainment in world this community imagined. Worth 20 percent of your final grade.

In addition, students will also participate through:

1.    Introducing speaker(s)

2.    One 1:1 meeting with your professor(s)

COURSE SCHEDULE: A WEEKLY BREAKDOWN

Assignment Before the First Day ofClass

Read (in this order, and available in PDF): 

·      Raymond Williams, “Culture is Ordinary,” Resources of Hope: Culture, Democracy and Socialism(1958)

·      Henry Jenkins, “Henry Jenkins on John Fiske,” Exploring the Roots of Digital and Media Literacy through Personal Narrative (2016)

·      Sasha Anawalt, “Introduction,” The Joffrey Ballet: Robert Joffrey and the Making of an American Dance Company(1996)

·      Henry Jenkins and Angela Ndalianis, “On Multisensory and Transmedia Stories,” Journal of Media Literacy(forthcoming)

In addition, choose a memory object to share in the first class.  

Important note to students: Be advised that this syllabus is subject to change - and probably will change - based on the progress of the class, news events, and/or guest speaker availability. 

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 20TH  

Week 1: Introduction

Assignment:In addition to Joe Rohde’s suggestions (TK), 

Read: 

·      This syllabus and sign it

·      Theodore Gioia, “The Great Reformatting,” The American Scholar(2020)

·      "Hero’s Journey,” Wikipedia

·      Excerpts from Mary Ann Caws (ed.), Joseph Cornell’s Theater of the Mind:Selected Diaries, Letters and Files(2000) 

Watch:

·      Art Spiegelman and Pilobolus Ballet, Hapless Hooligan In Still Moving

·      Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers on Star Wars

Write:

·      Dialogic Collaborative Journal, 1000 words 

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 27TH

Week 2: Creativity, Collaboration, Innovation, and Hybridity

Speaker:

·       Joe Rohde

Assignment: 

Read:

·       Brief excerpts from Cory Doctorow’s  “Unauthorized Bread” from Radicalized(2019)

·       Brief excerpts from Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl (2010)

·       Three excerpts from Daniel Miller’s The Comfort of Things (2009)

·       Excerpt from Henry Jenkins’ Comics and Stuff (2020)

·       Alexander B. Joy, “Candyland Was Invented for Polio Wards,” The Atlantic.

·       "Mr. Rohde's Wild Ride" https://www.oxy.edu/magazine/summer-2017/mr-rohdes-wild-ride

·       A World-Maker Retires https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/story/2021-01-07/joe-rohde-the-exit-interview

Explore:

·       The Atlantic’s “Object Lessons” 

·       Dominique Moody’s website

·       LA Library, 21 Collections -- Every Object Has a Story

Listen:

·       Kitchen Sisters,“21 Collections -- Every Object Has a Story” 

Write:

·       Dialogic Collaborative Journal, 1,000 words

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 3RD

Week 3: Workshop and Material Culture: Things and...Stuff

Speakers: 

·       Dominique Moody and Cory Doctorow 

Assignments: In addition to suggestions from Yuval Sharon (TK),

Read:

·       Sharon Quinn, “Cradle Will Rock,” TheFurious Improvisation: How the WPA and a Cast of Thousands Made High Art Out of Desperate Times (2008)

·        “Orson Welles’ Voodoo Macbeth: A Forgotten Diversity Landmark,” BBC4 Front Row(2018)

·       P. J. Grisar, “Before the Trump-Inspired Julius Caesar, There was Orson Welles’s Anti-Fascist Staging,” Hyperallergic(2017)

Watch: 

·       Trailer of The Industry’s “Sweetland”(Yuval Sharon)

·       “The Cradle Will Rock” (full film, so we can point to specific passages)

“What the Constitution Means to Me” (On Amazon Prime) (Anyone who does not have Amazon Prime is exempt from watching this.)

·        

·       “Twilight Los Angeles” 

·       “Nixon in China” (Excerpt)

·       “Nixon in China” (Trailer)

·       “Rodney King” (Trailer) 

·       “Between the World and Me” (Trailer)

·       John Outterbridge https://youtu.be/QY9cV_-tnAE

Write:

·      Dialogic Collaborative Journal, 1,000 words 

Prepare:

·      Show ‘n’ tell your Cornell box

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 10TH

Week 4: Living Newspapers and Transmedia Opera 

Speakers:

·       Yuval Sharon and TBD

Assignments: 

Read:

·       Alice Kimm, “Public Space in the Age of Covid-19” (2019)

·       Jason Hartman, “Homes of the Future:Now You Can Talk to Your Home From a Distance, with Alice Kim of JFAK,” Authority(2020)

·       bell hooks, “Black Vernacular: Architecture as Cultural Practice,” Art on My Mind(1995)

·       Carolina A. Miranda, “The Last (Porn) Picture Shows: Once Dotted with Dozens of Adult Cinemas, LA Now Has Two,” LA Times (2017)

·       Caroline A. Miranda, “Parler’s Vibe is MAGA-Red and Unreal,”LA Times (2020)

·       Caroline A. Miranda, “Essential Arts: It’s Time to Redesign the Electoral Map,” LA Times(2020)

·       Caroline A. Miranda, “Say Goodbye, Guy on Horse,” LA Times(2020)

·      Susan Sontag, Intro, Chapters 1 and 9, Illness as Metaphor (2001)

·      David Craig, “Pandemic and Its Metaphors: Sontag Revisited in the Covid-19 Era,” European Journal of Cultural Studies(2020) 

Listen:

·       Nicola Twilley and Geoff Manaugh, “The Architecture of Quarantine,” Architect

Watch: 

·      MC Lars, “The Hip Hop of Shakespeare,” TEDx USC

Write:

·      Dialogic Collaborative Journal, 1,000 words

·      Two pitches of 250 words each for your Living Newspaper

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 17TH

Week 5: COVID-19, Quarantine Culture, and The Future Spaces of Los Angeles

Speakers:

·       Alice Kimm, John Friedman, Carolina A. Miranda and Nicola Twilley 

Assignments: 

Read: 

·      Sangita Shresthova, “Introduction,” Practicing Futures: A Civic Imagination Handbook(2020)

·      Eryn Carlson, “Speculative Journalism Can Prepare Us for What Comes. Can It Also Promote Misinformation?,” Nieman Reports(2020) 

·      Buckminster Fuller, Introduction by Jaime Snyder and Chapter 1, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1969)

·      Aja Romano, “Hopepunk, the Latest Storytelling Trend, Is All About Weaponizing Optimism,”Vox(2018)

·      Aja Romano, “Janelle Monae’s Body of Work Is a Masterpiece of Modern Science Fiction,”Vox (2018)

·      Annalee Newitz, “The Elites Were Living High, Then Came the Fall,”The New York Times

·      Annalee Newitz, “What Unearthing Ancient Cities Teaches Us About Expoloring Outer Space,”Popular Science

·      Annalee Newitz, “Inside Meow Wolf, The Amusement Park For People Who Want a Weirder Disneyland,”Ars Technica

·      Annalee Newitz, “How to Write a Novel Set More than 125 Years in the Future,”Slate 

·      Annalee Newitz, “Robots Need Civil Rights, Too,”Boston Globe

·      Start readingJohn Jennings and Damian Duffy, The Parable of the Sower: A Graphic Novel Adaptation (2020)

Explore/Read:

·      Doug McLennan’s Diacriticalblog 

Watch:

·       The Infiltrators(trailer)

·       Alex Rivera on his film, The Infiltrators

·       Sleep Merchants(trailer) 

Listen:

·       Imaginary Worlds: “Solarpunk The Future”

Write:

·      Dialogic Collaborative Journal, 1,000 words

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 24TH

Week 6: Speculative Journalism

Speakers:

Sangita Shresthova, Doug McLennan and Annilee Newitz

Assignments:

Read:

·      bell hooks, “Beauty Laid Bare: Aesthetics in the Ordinary,” Art on My Mind(1995)

·      continue reading John Jennings and Damian Duffy, The Parable of the Sower: A Graphic Novel Adaptation (2020)

Attend:

·       The Civic Imagination Workshop on March 2, 12:30-2 (Zoom) 

Write:

·      Dialogic Collaborative Journal, 1,000 words 

Prepare:

·      Show ‘n’ tell your Cornell box and your Living Newspaper project

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 3RD

Week 7: Workshop: Cornell Box, Living Newspaper, Improvisation, and Review 

Assignments:

Read: 

·       Finish readingJohn Jennings and Damian Duffy, The Parable of the Sower: A Graphic Novel Adaptation(2020)

·        Lynell George, Chapters 2, 6, 8, A Handful of Earth, a Handful of Sky: The World of Octavia Butler (2020)

·       Octavia E. Butler, “Speech Sounds”(1983) 

Explore:

·       Ayana Jaimeson’s website for OEB Legacy Network

Watch: 

·       Parable of the Soweropera trailer

·       Tyree Boyd-Pates and Shamell Bell, “Dance Activism and Black Lives Matter,” Movement/Matters

Write:

·       Dialogic Collaborative Journal, 1000 words (This one must be about the Civic Imagination Workshop.)

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 10TH

Week 8 Octavia E. Butler

Speakers:

·       John Jennings and Damian Duffy 

·       Lynell George, Dr. Shamell Bell, and Ayana Jaimeson 

Assignments: 

Read: 

·       Rebecca Onion, “Reclaiming the Machine: An Introductory Look at Steampunk in Everyday Practice,” Journal of Neo-Victorian Studies(2008)

·       James Ring Adam, “Native Authors Invade Sci-Fi: Indigenous Writers Are Reshaping Speculative Fiction,” American Indian(2019)

·       Layla Leiman, “Afrofuturism Artists to Watch Out For,” Between 10 and 5(2019) 

·       Bruce Sterling, “Preface,”Mirrorshades: A Cyberpunk Anthology(1986).

Listen:

·       N. K. Jemisin on The Ezra Klein Show

Watch:

·       Cyberpunk 2077game trailer

·       Jingle Jangletrailer

Write:

·      Dialogic Collaborative Journal, 1,000 words 

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 17TH

Week 9: The Worlds of Speculative Fiction: Solarpunk, Steampunk, Cyberpunk, Afrofuturism, Native Futurism, Chicano Futurism

Speakers:

·       Shawn Taylor, Grace Dillan, and Curtis Marez 

·       Living Newspapers and Cornell Boxes workshop 

Assignments: 

Read:

·       Ann Pendleton-Jillian and John Seely Brown, ‘Worldbuilding”, Design Unbound: Designing for Emergence in a White Water World, Volume 2: Ecologies of Change (2018)

·       Lisa Pon, “Raphael 2020,” Norton Simon Museum(Start at 17:00)

·       “How Nonny de La Pena, The ‘Godmother of VR’, Is Changing the Mediascape,” Wall Street Journal(2018) 

Watch: 

·      Game of Thrones transmedia campaign

Write:

·       Dialogic Collaborative Journal, 1,000 words

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 24TH

Week 10: Hybrid Media, Immersive Entertainment

Speakers:

·       Ann Pendleton-Julian, Lisa Pon, and Nonny de la Pena  

Assignments: 

Read: 

·      Abigail De Kosnik, “Relationship Nations: Phillipines/US Fan Art and Fan Fiction,” Transformative Works and Cultures(2019)

·      Paromita Gupta, “A Conversation with Terry Marshall (Intelligent Mischief/Wakanda Dream Lab)” Confessions of an Aca-Fan(2019)

·      Henry Jenkins, Mimi Ito, and danah boyd, “Gaps and Genres of Participation” Participatory Culture in a Networked Era (2015)

Write:

·      Dialogic Collaborative Journal, 1,000 words

Prepare:

·      Show ‘n’ tell your Cornell box and Living Newspaper

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 31ST

Week 11: Workshop: Fandom, and Participatory Culture 

Speakers:

·       Abigail De Kosnik and Terry Marshall 

·       Living Newspapers and Cornell Boxes Workshop 

Assignments:

Read:

·       Caty Borum Chattoo, “‘It’s Like Taking Your Vodka with a Chaser’: Creativity and Comedy for Social Justice in the Participatory Media Age,” “‘Maybe They Think Beauty Can’t Come from Here’: Resilience and Power in the Climate Crisis,” The Revolution Will Be Hilarious: Creativity, Comedy and Civic Power (forthcoming)

·       An Xiao Mina, chapter 1, 5.1, From Memes to Movements: How the World’s Most Viral Media is Changing Social Protest and Power (2019) 

Write:

·       Dialogic Collaborative Journal, 1,000 words

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 7TH

Week 12: NO CLASS (wellness day)

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 14TH

Week 13: Activism in the Age of Participatory Culture; Workshop

Speakers:

·       An Xiao Mina and Caty Baroom Chattou 

Assignments:

·       Work on your Living Newspaper Project (half the class presents next week, with former guest speakers returning, and half the week after that, with more invited guests).

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 21ST

Week 14: Presentation and Evaluations

Assignments:

·       Work on your Living Newspaper Project 

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 28TH

Week 15: Presentations 

MONDAY, MAY 10TH, 2-4 p.m.

Final Exam: Presentation of Joseph Cornell Box

ABOUT YOUR INSTRUCTORS

Sasha Anawalt

I had my first newspaper when I was ten years old with my best friend. It was calledThe Chocolate Newsand, mostly, we wrote about Mean Mr. Vanilla. In college, I started the first arts news weekly magazine for the McGill Dailyin Montreal, which is still published to this day. Turns out, I like starting things. When I moved to Los Angeles, I became the first chief dance critic at the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner. I wrote a book about the Joffrey Ballet. A best-seller, it was turned into a documentary feature film that aired on PBS American Mastersin 2013. Between these gigs, I had three children and helmed the weekly radio spot on KCRW for dance criticism, called “Dance Notes.” I was also the first dance critic for the L.A. Weekly. I served on the Pulitzer Prize committee jury for criticism for two years, and, one of those years, Jonathan Gold won for his restaurant criticism. Determined to help put L.A. on the so-called cultural map, I was by good fortune given the chance to create and lead the USC Annenberg/Getty Arts Journalism Fellowship Program for 13 years and the NEA Institute for Theater and Musical Theater for USC Annenberg for seven. These snowballed into being asked to help build the first Master’s degree program in Specialized Journalism (the Arts) at USC Annenberg. Now, I am a full professor of professional practice and am working on launching a new Master’s program for the school in 2021 that is all about Food Culture Journalism. I was born in New York City.

Henry Jenkins

Henry Jenkins is the Provost's Professor of Communication, Journalism, Cinematic Arts and Education at the University of Southern California and the founder and former co-director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program. He is the author or editor of 20 books on various aspects of media and popular culture, including Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, Spreadable Media: Creating Meaning and Value in a Networked Culture (with Sam Ford and Joshua Green), and By Any Media Necessary: The New Youth Activism (with Sangita Shresthova and others). He has two more books that just came out this spring -- Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination: Case Studies of Creative Social Change and Comics and Stuff. He is the co-host of the How Do You Like It So Far? podcast, which explores popular culture in a changing world and has run the Confessions of an Aca-Fan blog for more than 15 years.

Back to School: Science Fiction as Media Theory

This term, I am spending much of my time focused on speculative fiction. In part, this is because the work I have been doing on the Civic Imagination has left me working through core concepts from the realm of speculative fiction — especially the ways world-building has taken on a bigger role in social change movements but also because as we start to imagine life after the pandemic, a focus on alternative futures seems more urgent than ever. I have returned to a course I have only taught once before — Science Fiction as Media Theory — which encourages students to think creatively about the work theory does, who does theory, and how it operates in different contexts. While there are other versions of the class out there, I have updated it so much since 2011 when I taught it last that I thought it was worth sharing again. For those of you who are interested in the thinking behind the class, I recently published a piece demonstrating its underlying assumptions through an analysis of The Space Merchants, a classic SF novel dealing with the future of advertising Otherwise, without much more fanfare, here’s the syllabus.

              COMM 620: Science Fiction as Media Theory 

4 units

Fall 2020 – Tuesdays – 12:30-3:20 p.m.

Section:20900D

Location: https://blackboard.usc.edu/

Instructor: Henry Jenkins

Office:ASC-101C

Office Hours: Virtual office hours by appointment. Contact assistant. (Info below.)

Contact Info: hjenkins@usc.edu

Assistant: Amanda Ford

Contact Info: amandafo@usc.edu 

          Course Description

This class explores the ways that science fiction—sometimes known as speculative fiction—has historically functioned as a form of vernacular theory about media technologies, practices, and institutions. As recent writings about "design fictions" illustrate, these speculations have, in turn, inspired the developers of new technologies, as well as those who create content for such platforms, helping to frame our expectations about the nature of media change. And, increasingly, media theorists—raised in a culture where science fiction has been a pervasive influence—are drawing on its metaphors as they speculate about virtual worlds, cyborg feminism, post-humanism, and afro-futurism, among a range of other topics.

This seminar will explore the multiple intersections between science fiction and media theory, reading literary and filmic fictions as theoretical speculations and classic and contemporary theory as forms of science fiction. The scope of the course ranges from technological Utopian writers from the early 20th century to contemporary imaginings of digital futures and steampunk pasts. Not simply a course on science fiction as a genre, this seminar will invite us to explore what kinds of cultural work science fiction performs and how it has contributed to larger debates about communication and culture.

          Student Learning Outcomes 

By the end of the course, students will be able to:

·      describe the historic relationship between speculative fiction and media theory. 

·      explain key movements in science fiction (such as technological utopianism, cyberpunk, steampunk) and discuss their relationship to larger theories of media change.

·      trace the roots of contemporary media theories of cyborg feminism, afrofuturism, and trans/post-humanism back through science fiction films and literature.

·      develop their own critical account of how ideas about media and technology have been shaped by the discourses associated with science fiction.

       Required Readings and Supplementary Materials

·      Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

·      Frederik Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth, The Space Merchants

·      Pat Cadigan, Mindplayers

·       Paolo Bacigalupi, The Windup Girl 

·       One of the following: 

o  Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, original novel, Audible audiobook, or Damian Duffy and John Jennings, Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower: A Graphic NovelAdaptation

o  Walidah Imarisha, adrienne maree brown, et al. Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements

o  Charlie Jane Anders, Lesley Nneka Arimah, et al., The People’ s Future of the United States

o  Cory Doctorow, Radicalized. Available for $3 as ebook at https://craphound.com/category/radicalized-full/

All else is on Blackboard.

  Description and Assessment of Assignments & Assignment Submission Policy 

All assignments (except for Blackboard posts) should be submitted via email to the instructor by 5 p.m. on the due date.

1.    Blackboard Posts: Each week, students will post a reaction to the readings via the class Blackboard site. The reaction might be a comment, a question, or a provocation, and often will be a complex mixture of all of the above. It can be informal and need not be more than a few paragraphs, but it should show the student's thinking process in response to the topics and materials being encountered that week. This is the primary mechanism by which I will be monitoring your mastery of the core concepts of the class. You need not respond to every reading each week, but there should be signs of close reading and critical engagement. (30%)

2.     Media Analysis Paper: Applying the concepts of science fiction as a "design platform" that we will encounter in the first class session, students will choose a film, television series, or game which they feel offers a particularly vivid embodiment of a science fiction concept and provide an analysis which considers the thinking behind this representation of future media or technology, the ways this concept gets deployed through the story and the values which become associated with it, and how this concept may be deployed as a springboard for creative thinking about the development of future media tools, platforms, or processes. Along the way, students might consider the differences between embodying these concepts in an audio-visual media as opposed to the ways they might be dealt with in a literary text. The result should be a short but impactful essay (roughly 5-7 pages). (20%)

3.     Theory Analysis Paper:A key theme in our discussions is the idea that science fiction functions much like theory, to speculate about the implications of current social, economic, political, cultural, or technological practices and to envision potential outcomes of current trends. In this paper, students will reverse their lens and examine theory as a form of speculative fiction. Students will select a work of media theory and discuss what they see as its vision for the future (whether implicit or explicit). What does it have to say about the nature of media change? Does it see people as moving towards a utopian or dystopian future? What, if any, explicit use does it make of metaphors drawn from science fiction as it constructs its vision for the future? What kinds of response does it seek from its readers to the problems or potentials that it has identified? Students shall produce a short, impactful essay (5-7 pages) which demonstrates close reading of the theoretical text and an ability to push analysis beyond what's explicitly on the page. (20%)

4.     Final Paper: Students, in consultation with the professor, will develop a distinctive project which emerges from the intersection between their research interests and the course content. The result can either be a creative project or a paper, though either should show the ability to construct an argument and mobilize evidence in support of their core claims and should show a grasp of the basic conceptual framework of the course. Students will be asked to give a short class presentation, sharing their project and its implications with their classmates, as part of the process of developing and refining their ideas. (30%)

5.     Participation: Students are expected to come to class prepared and ready to participate in discussions around these materials. On most days, we have one or more guest speaker, so it is especially important to bring questions to gain maximum benefit from their experiences and expertise.

Each activity here builds on the previous ones, so it is important to meet deadlines in the class.  

Unless specified otherwise, I expect to fill the designated class period with a mix of discussions, activities, and guest visitors, so students should plan, under normal circumstances, to stay for the class period.

      Breakdown of Grade

·      Blackboard Posts (30%)

·      Media Analysis Paper (20%)

·      Theory Analysis Paper (20%)

·      Final Paper (30%)

     Course Schedule: A Weekly Breakdown

Important note to students:Be advised that this syllabus is subject to change—and probably will change—based on the progress of the class, events, and/or guest speaker availability, where relevant.  Students should consult the Registration Calendar for dates regarding add/drop deadlines, fees, grading options, etc.

TUESDAY, JANUARY19TH

Week 1: Science Fiction as Design Fiction

·      Students will watch Minority Reportprior to the first class session.

·      Brian David Johnson, excerpt from Science Fiction Prototyping: Designing the Future with Science Fiction (Morgan and Claypool, 2011), pp.9-32.

·      Philip K. Dick, "The Minority Report," Selected Stories of Philip K. Dick (New York: Random House, 2002), pp. 227-264.

·      Bruce Sterling, "Design Fiction," Interactions 16(3), May-June 2009, pp. 20-24.

·      Ann Pendleton-Julian and John Seeley Brown, excerpt from Design Unbound(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2018).

·      The Ezra Klein Show, “I Build a World with Fantasy Master N. K. Jemison.” 

TUESDAY, JANUARY 26TH

Week Two: Technological Utopianism

·      Howard P. Segal, "The Vocabulary of Technological Utopianism" and "American Visions of Technological Utopia," Technological Utopianism in American Culture(Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2005), pp. 10-44.

·      Edward Bellamy, excerpt from Looking Backward, Chapter 1-12, pp. 3-72.

·      Katharine Burdekin, excerpt from Proud Man13-62.

·      W. E. B. Dubois, “The Comet”  (1920). 

·      José Vasconcelos, “The Cosmic Race” (1925). 

·      (Reccomended) Alexis Lothian, “Dystopian Impulses, Feminist Negativity, and The Fascism of the Baby’s Face,” Old Futures: Speculative Fiction and Queer Possibility(New York: New York University Press, 2018), pp. 57-87

·        

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 2ND

Week Three: The Origins of Science Fiction

·      Andrew Ross, "Getting Out of the Gernsbeck Continuum," Strange Weather: Culture, Science and Technology in the Age of Limits(London: Verso, 1991), pp. 100-135

·      John W. Campbell, "Twilight" (pp. 40-63); Lester del Rey, "Helen O'Loy" (pp. 62-73); Theodore Sturgeon, "Microscopic God" (pp. 115-142); and Clifford Simak, “Huddling Place” (pp. 261-280) in Robert Silverberg (ed.), Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Vol. 1, (New York, NY: Orb Books, 2005).

·      Vannevar Bush, "As We May Think" (pp. 35-48); Alan Turing, "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" (pp. 49-64); Nobert Wiener, and "Men, Machines, and the World About" (pp. 65-72), in Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort (ed.), The New Media Reader(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003).

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 9TH

Week Four: Postwar Dystopias

·      George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language." 

·      George Orwell, 1984, Chapter One.

·      Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, pp. 1-44, 117-131.

·      Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451.

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 16TH

Week Five: The Space Merchants and American Advertising

·      Vance Packard, excerpt from The Hidden Persuaders(New York: Ig, 2007), pp. 31-64.

·      Jules Henry, "Advertising as a Philosophical System," Culture Against Man(New York: Vintage, 1965), pp. 45-99.

·      Frederik Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth, The Space Merchants(New York: St. Martins, 1958).

·      Frederik Pohl, "Tunnel Under the World" (pp. 1-34) and "Happy Birthday, Baby Jesus" (pp. 62-85), The Best of Frederik Pohl(New York: Sidgewick and Johnson, 1977).

·      Henry Kuttner, “All Mimsy Were the Borogroves,” "The Twonky," The Best of Henry Kutner(New York: Ballantine, 1975), pp. 167-189.

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 23TH

Week Six: Cordwainer Smith and Psychological Warfare

·      Paul M.A. Linebarger, excerpt from Psychological Warfare(New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1948), pp. 43-92.

·      Cordwainer Smith, "Scanners Live in Vain" (pp. 65-95); "The Dead Lady of Clown Town" (pp. 223-286); "The Ballad of Lost C'Mell" (pp. 401-417); "A Planet Named Shayol" (pp. 419-448, The Rediscovery of Man: The Complete Short Science Fiction of Cordwainer Smith(Boston: Boston Science Fiction Association, 1993).

TUESDAY, MARCH 2ND

Week Seven: Altered States

·      Alvin Toffler, "Diversity," Future Shock(New York: Bantam, 1984), pp. 283-322.

·      Betty Friedan, "The Problem That Has No Name" (pp. 57-78) and "The Crisis in Women's Identity," The Feminine Mystique(New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2001), pp.123-136.

·      James Tiptree Jr., "The Women Men Don't See," in Brian Atteby and Ursula K. Le Guin (eds.), The Norton Book of Science Fiction(New York: W.W. Norton, 1997), pp. 255-279.

·      Pamela Zoline, "Heat Death of the Universe," in Pamela Sargent (ed.), The New Women of Wonder(New York: Vintage, 1978), pp. 100-119.

·      Kate Wilhelm, "Baby, You Were Great," in Pamela Sargent (ed.), Women of Wonder (New York: Vintage, 1974), pp. 139-158.

·      Imaginary Worlds: The Mysterious James Tiptree. 

TUESDAY, MARCH 9TH

Week Eight: Cyberpunk 

·      Bruce Sterling, "Preface" (pp. XX); James Patrick Kelly, "Solstice;" (pp. 66-104); Bruce Sterling and Lewis Shiner, "Mozart in Mirrorshades" (pp. 223-239); and John Shirley, "Freezone;" (pp. 139- 177), in Bruce Sterling (ed.), Mirrorshades: A Cyberpunk Anthology(Berkeley, CA: Ace Books, 1988).

·      William Gibson, "Johnny Mnemonic," Burning Chrome(New York: Ace, 1986), pp.1-22.

·      Samuel R. Delaney, "Some Real Mothers: An Interview with Samuel R. Delaney," in Silent Interviews(Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1994), pp. 164-185.

TUESDAY, MARCH 16TH

Week Nine: Cyborg Feminism

·      Anne Balsamo, "Signal to Noise: On the Meaning of Cyberpunk Subculture," in Frank Biocca and Mark R. Levy (eds.),Communication in the Age of Virtual Reality(New York, NY: Routledge, 1995), pp. 347-368.

·      N. Katherine Hayles, "Towards Embodied Virtuality," in How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics(Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999), pp. 1-24.

·      Ray Kurzweil, "The Six Epochs" (pp.7-34) and "Eich bin ein Singularitarian" (pp. 369-390), The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, (London, England: Penguin, 2006), pp. 7-34.

·      C.L. Moore, "No Woman Born," in Mary Flanagan and Austin Booth (eds.), Reload: Rethinking Women and Cyberculture(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), pp. 261-300.

·      Pat Cadigan, Mindplayers(Orion, 2000).

·      Aja Romano, “Janelle Monae’s Body of Work Is A Masterpiece of Modern Science Fiction,” Vox, May 16 2018. 

·      Donna Harroway, "Cyborgs at Large," in Constance Penley and Andrew Ross (eds.), Technoculture(Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), pp. 1-20.

TUESDAY, MARCH 23RD 

Week Ten: Wellness Day

TUESDAY, MARCH 30TH 

Week Eleven: Steampunk and Ecofuturism

·      Rebecca Onion, "Reclaiming the Machine: An Introductory Look at Steampunk in Everyday Practice," Neo-Victorian Studies1(1), Autumn 2008, pp. 138-163.

·       Naomi Klein, excerpt from No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need (Boston: Haymarket, 2017[MOU1] ).

·       “A Message from the Future With Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez,” The Intercept, April 17, 2019.

·      “The Solarpunk Manifesto.” 

·      Imaginary Worlds, “Solarpunk The Future.” 

·       Paolo Bacigalupi, The Windup Girl (Night Shade Books, 2009).

Guest Speaker:Ed Finn, Director, Center for Science and the Imagination, Arizona State University

TUESDAY, APRIL 6TH

Week Twelve: Octavia Butler and Her Legacy 

·      Alex Zamalin, “Octavia Butler and the Politics of Utopian Transcendence,” Black Utopia: The History of an Idea from Black Nationalism to Afrofuturism(New York: Columbia University Press, 2019), 123-136. 

·      Engage with Parable of the Sowerthrough one of the following:

o   Octavia Butler’s original novel

o   Audible audiobook

o   Damian Duffy and John Jennings, Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower: A Graphic NovelAdaptation (Seattle: Abrams, 2019). 

·      Octavia Butler, “The Evening and The Morning and the Night.”

·      Sami Schalk, “Interpreting Disability Metaphor and Race in Octavia Butler’s ‘The Evening and the Morning and the Night’,” African American Review50(2), 2017, pp. 139-151. (Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/afa.2017.0018)

TUESDAY, APRIL 13TH

Week Thirteen: Afrofuturism and Global Science Fiction 

·      Alondra Nelson, “’Making the Impossible Possible’: An Interview with Nalo Hopkinson,” Social Text20(2), 2002, pp. 97-113.

·      Elizabeth C. Hamilton, “Afrofuturism and the Technologies of Survival,” African Arts50(4), Winter 2017, pp. 18-23.

·      Suzanne Newman Fricke, “Indigenous Futurisms in the Hyperpresent Now,” World Art 9(2), 2019, pp. 107-121.

·     Alexis Pauline Gumba, “Evidence” (pp. 33-42)[MOU2] ; Walidah Imarisha, “Black Angel” (pp. 43-56); Morgann Philips, “The Long Memory” (pp. 57-78); Mia Mingel, “Hollow” (pp.109-122) Autumn Brown, Small and Bright” (pp. pp.79-880; Gabriel Teodros, “Lalibela” (pp. 123-134), and Adrienne Marie Brown, “Outro,” (pp. 279-282 in Adriene Marie Brown and Walidah Imarisha (eds.), Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements(New York: AK Press, 2015).

TUESDAY, APRIL 20TH

Week Fourteen: Science Fiction and Social Change

·      A. Merc Rustad, “Our Aim Is Not To Die” (pp. 27-47); Malka Older, “Disruption and Continuity” (pp. 84-92) Ashok K.  Baker, “By His Boostraps” (pp. 133-144); N. K. Jemison, “Give Me Cornbread or Give Me Death” (pp. 298-306); Charles Yu, “Good News, Bad News” (pp. 307-320), in Victor Lavalle and John Joseph Adams (eds.), A People’s Future of the United States (New York: One World, 2019).

·      Cory Doctorow, “Model Minority,” Radicalized: Four Tales for Our Present(New York: Tor, 2020), pp. 111-180. 

·      Mariabe Kambe, “Justice,” in Alexandria Brodsky and Rachel Kauder Nalebuff (eds.) The Feminist Utopia Project: Fifty-Seven Versions of a Wildly Better World(New York: The Feminist Press at CUNY, 2015), pp. X

·     Curtis Marez, “Farm Worker Futurism Today,” Farm Worker Futurism: Speculative Technologies of Resistance(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), pp. 155-182.

TUESDAY, APRIL 27TH

Week Fifteen: Student Presentations