Graduation Term
2024
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Department of English
Committee Chair
Christopher Breu
Abstract
As one of science fiction’s most beloved archetypes, the alien lends itself quite logically to social and political discourse. Foregrounding texts from the black speculative genres of Afrofuturism and Africanfuturism, I examine the ways in which the category of the alien and science fictional tropes of the alien manifest in a reading of race, racism, and other forms of alienation. Theorizing and deploying the categories xeno-corporeality and xeno-space, I inquire into and critique ways in which extraterrestriality coincides with black racial experience. Through a discussion of texts such as Jordan Peele’s Get Out, and Du Bois’s “The Comet”, I argue that the forms of spatial terrors and threats to the black body explored in these texts mirror the nature of corporeal and spatial alterity experienced by the alien in popular SF. Further, in my reading of alienness as is imagined in Nnedi Okorafor’s Africanfuturist worlds, I contend that texts such as Lagoon and Binti re-narrativize the oft-rehearsed imagining of the SF alien as archetypal villain. Instead, in these African speculative worlds, we are invited into a convivial, inter-specieal interaction between human and non-human such that there is a rupturing and blurring of spatial and corporeal borders. We are offered a cyborgian futurity where human and non-human defines ontological existence. Finally, I inquire into the phenomenon of student silence by discussing some of the pedagogical issues that often attend teaching black speculative fictions in a Midwestern classroom. I share my experience teaching General Education courses in black speculative fictions, and recommend that incorporating writing practices such as the dialectical notebook and focused freewriting might help instructors negotiate student silence by creating a more, student-oriented, collaborative teaching dynamic. KEYWORDS: Alien, Afrofuturism, Africanfuturism, xeno-corporeality, xeno-space, student silence
Access Type
Dissertation-Open Access
Recommended Citation
Ankomah, Edmund Hammah, "Fabulating the Alien: Black Speculative Fiction and a Re-reading of the Xenological Archive" (2024). Theses and Dissertations. 2048.
https://ir.library.illinoisstate.edu/etd/2048
DOI
https://doi.org/10.30707/ETD2024.20250211063115822136.1000000
