Understanding the Past, Imagining the Future: Teaching Speculative Fiction and Afrofuturism

Abstract

Understanding the Past, Imagining the Future:Teaching Speculative Fiction and Afrofuturism Jacqueline Ellis and Jason D. Martinek Teaching the Future: Teachers Talk with Sonya Donaldson In this Teachers Talk, Transformations editors Jacqueline Ellis and Jason Martinek spoke with our New Jersey City University colleague, Sonya Donaldson. Our conversation focused mostly on her scholarly and pedagogical interests in speculative fiction and Afrofuturism, but this discussion also led us to make connections to institutional and disciplinary structures in education, the devaluing of historical knowledge, the importance of creativity and imagination in the classroom, and the transformative potential of, as Donaldson eloquently puts it, "looking to the past, to understand the present, to build for the future." Donaldson is currently completing work on a book manuscript, "'Irreconcilable Differences?': Memory, History, and the Echoes of Diaspora," which examines the ways in which black artists, in engaging sites of shared memory (both real and imagined), construct diasporic spaces outside of the nation paradigm. Her digital humanities project, "Singing the Nation Into Being: Anthems and the Politics of Black Performance," is an Omeka site that looks at the ways that black subjectivities are constituted and contested vis-à-vis singing of "The Black National Anthem." Jacqueline Ellis: Tell us a little bit about your academic background and your interests in speculative fiction and Afrofuturism. Sonya Donaldson: I've always been interested in speculative fiction, from the Star Trek and Star Wars franchises to the literature of Octavia Butler—who [End Page 111] I think of as foundational to my knowledge of speculative fiction, Afrofuturism, and my ability to imagine a different world in many ways. I was also a technology journalist and editor for many years. At one point I set up and ran my own small test lab. I tested hardware and software and wrote articles about them. Then, in graduate school at the University of Virginia, I designed a course called "Technology and Identities." It was an interesting moment. One of the people tasked with advising graduate students kept saying, "It's a course about identity politics." I'm pretty sure he meant "It's a course about black people" when he said that. I replied, "No, it's literally about technology and our identities–who we are in terms of how we identify ourselves, how we are socially constructed, whether by race or gender, and how our identities shape our interactions with technology and the broader implications of those kinds of interactions." I teach primarily African diasporic literature so race is key to what I do. But I think that the questions that were central to "Technologies and Identities" apply broadly. One of the things that I realized was important was for students to have technology literacy. We had conversations about the digital divide and access to technology from the perspective of race and economics. But here I was at an institution that had relatively wealthy students from middle-class and upper-middle-class backgrounds. And they still needed technology literacy. Yes, there were disparities—absolutely—but we were at a cultural moment (one that is still ongoing) in terms of our relationship with technology where we needed to think deeply about understanding and not just consuming technology. JE: So the technology literacy you mentioned is who are you or how your identity is constructed in relation to the technology? SD: Yes, that's part of it. But it is also understanding technology itself, how it operates, how it's not this neutral thing. Technology comes with its own biases because it's programmed and developed by human beings. One of the things that we did early on in the "Technologies and Identities" course was to use a Facebook app called "Make A Baby." My students had to go on Facebook and make a baby. It was this virtual baby that you had to make and then care for. You also had to make sure within the game, within the app, that you had enough resources to maintain the baby because the baby would grow into a toddler and then a child. It was an interesting moment for my students when they came back at a certain point during the semester freaking out because...