Homer’s Odyssey, Sci-Fi, and Afro-Futurism is a class in Critical Theory, Visual Culture/Film Studies that explores the impact of The Odyssey in Sci-Fi, Critical Theory, and Post-Colonial discourse in experimental film, poetry, and the novel. The class explores why The Odyssey has become the source text for the Sci-Fi genre in which seas are replaced by space, in which the journey home is the means of encounter with the strange and the alien, and where the migration of a people becomes existential. The class is also an introduction to Homer’s Odyssey, to the philosophical interpretation of film/Sci-Fi, and to the movement known as Afro-Futurism, a transnational Black avant-garde that uses music, film, art, and poetics to explore the future in terms of the place of space. In this class there is a deliberate juxtaposition of mainstream and experimental Sci-Fi to elicit a new critical thinking.
Credits: 3
Prerequisites: Take one 3.0 credit, 200 level course from one of the following subjects: DAH (Art History), DEN (English), DAS (Academic Studies), DVC (Visual Culture).