College Seminar (101-7-23)
Topic
Bioinsecurities: Race and Colonialism in Global Sc
Instructors
Kalyan Sunder Sameer Nadiminti
Meeting Info
Allison Residential Comm 1021: Mon, Wed 3:30PM - 4:50PM
Overview of class
Topic: Bioinsecurities: Race and Colonialism in Global Science Fiction
This reading-intensive first year seminar will consider how colonialism and contagion together produce racialization in science fiction. In the year of the pandemic, European nations voted for strict vaccine export control measures, effectively slowing down access to medications for the Global South. Phrases like "vaccine nationalism" as well as "vaccine passports" have become commonplace. This twilight zone of deepening crises, and the imperial paranoid imaginary of what Neel Ahuja calls "bioinsecurities," have long been represented by science fiction authors. Keeping a firm eye on epidemiology, race, and imperialism, this course charts a path along genre-bending, speculative fictions that imagine contagion and infection not just as disease but as racialized others from the late-nineteenth to the early twenty-first century. Contagion emerges not just as a moral panic or embodied paranoia about infection, but as a method of relationality that draws tightly controlled, governmentalized worlds around raced and differentiated bodies. We will think about how these fictional netherworlds produce new subjectivities of life, death, and living death. Alongside science fictional as well as speculative novels, spanning postcolonial, British as well as multiethnic US writing, we will also watch films like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Night of the Living Dead, District 9, Arrival.
But that's not the only agenda for this course: on the way, we will simultaneously encounter SF that offers us important insights on the question of race and empire more broadly, i.e. narratives that don't necessarily take contagion as their point of departure but are key in understanding racialization and the postcolony. Similarly, while the course is largely organized around science fiction, we will also ask what it might mean to think about speculative fiction or realism alongside SF. Thus, we will encounter texts that are thinking more abstractly about difference in order to understand different registers of SF.
Class Materials (Required)
Required Texts:
H,G, Wells, The War of the Worlds (Edward Gorey edition)
Amitav Ghosh, The Calcutta Chromosome
Ling Ma, Severance
Victor LaValle, The Destroyer
Class Attributes
WCAS College Seminar