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- Creators: Barrett, The Honors College
Description
Modern and contemporary African American writers employ science fiction in order to recast ideas on past, present, and future black culture. This dissertation examines Afrofuturism’s cultural aesthetics, which appropriate devices from science fiction and fantasy in order to revise, interrogate, and re-examine historical events insufficiently treated by literary realism. The dissertation includes treatments of George Schuyler, Ishmael Reed, Octavia Butler, Colson Whitehead, Nalo Hopkinson, and Chicana/ofuturism.
The original contribution of this research is to highlight how imagination of a posthuman world has made it possible for African American writers to envision how racial power can be re-configured and re-negotiated. Focusing on shifting racial dynamics caught up in the swirl of technological changes, this research illuminates a complex process of literary production in which black culture and identity have been continuously re-interpreted.
In the post-war and post-Civil Rights Movement eras African American writers began reflecting on shifting racial dynamics in light of technological changes. This shift in which black experience became mechanized and digitized explains how technology became a source of new African American fiction. The relationships between humans and their external conditions appear in such futuristic themes as trans-human anamorphosis, cyberspace, and digital souls. These thematic devices, which explore humanity outside its phenotypic boundaries, provide African American writers with tools to demystify deterministic views of race. Afrofuturism has responded to the conceptual transformation of humanity with a race-specific scope, locating the presence of black culture in a high-tech world.
Techno-scientific progress has provided important resources in contemporary theory, yet these theoretical foci too seldom have been drawn into critical race discourses. This discrepancy is due to techno-scientific progress having served as a tool for the legitimation of scientific racism under global capitalism for centuries. Responding to this critical lacuna, the dissertation highlights an under-explored field in which African American literature responds to techno-culture’s involvement in contemporary discussions of race. Rather than repeat nominal assumptions of Eurocentric modernity and its racist hegemony, this dissertation theorizes how modern techno-culture’s outcomes—such as information science, genetic engineering, and computer science—shape minority lives, and how minority groups appropriate these outcomes to enact their own liberation.
The original contribution of this research is to highlight how imagination of a posthuman world has made it possible for African American writers to envision how racial power can be re-configured and re-negotiated. Focusing on shifting racial dynamics caught up in the swirl of technological changes, this research illuminates a complex process of literary production in which black culture and identity have been continuously re-interpreted.
In the post-war and post-Civil Rights Movement eras African American writers began reflecting on shifting racial dynamics in light of technological changes. This shift in which black experience became mechanized and digitized explains how technology became a source of new African American fiction. The relationships between humans and their external conditions appear in such futuristic themes as trans-human anamorphosis, cyberspace, and digital souls. These thematic devices, which explore humanity outside its phenotypic boundaries, provide African American writers with tools to demystify deterministic views of race. Afrofuturism has responded to the conceptual transformation of humanity with a race-specific scope, locating the presence of black culture in a high-tech world.
Techno-scientific progress has provided important resources in contemporary theory, yet these theoretical foci too seldom have been drawn into critical race discourses. This discrepancy is due to techno-scientific progress having served as a tool for the legitimation of scientific racism under global capitalism for centuries. Responding to this critical lacuna, the dissertation highlights an under-explored field in which African American literature responds to techno-culture’s involvement in contemporary discussions of race. Rather than repeat nominal assumptions of Eurocentric modernity and its racist hegemony, this dissertation theorizes how modern techno-culture’s outcomes—such as information science, genetic engineering, and computer science—shape minority lives, and how minority groups appropriate these outcomes to enact their own liberation.
ContributorsKim, Myungsung (Author) / Lockard, Joe (Thesis advisor) / Lester, Neal (Committee member) / Holbo, Christine (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017
Description
A creative project seeking to incorporate rhetorical theory into speculative fiction. Tales From Beyond the Breach is a series of five stories set in a post climate apocalypse, all dealing in some way with rhetorical understandings of truth. Each chapter or story draws on a different philosopher, though there is some overlap and reflection of my own personal beliefs. The project is meant to entertain as well as provoke thought, taking what we know and imagining what could be.
ContributorsLee, Jasmine (Author) / Hannah, Mark (Thesis director) / Bell, Matthew (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Department of English (Contributor)
Created2023-05
DescriptionAcademic interests combined into a speculative science fiction novel. Concepts from American Sign Language, mechanical engineering, and journalism studies were all utilized during development of the novel.
ContributorsGraziano, River (Author) / Irish, Jennifer (Thesis director) / Bell, Matt (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Program (Contributor) / Department of English (Contributor)
Created2024-05
Description
Time travel is closely associated with futuristic science fiction, but it is a concept that dates back to ancient times. Over many generations it has been developed and explored narratively and scientifically. This paper aims to document and analyze the history of the time travel concept and the important role fiction had in its development.
ContributorsElkins, Sydney (Author) / Foy, Joseph (Thesis director) / Maynard, Andrew (Committee member) / School of Earth and Space Exploration (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2020-12
Description
The Alien Play, as posted here, is a placeholder name for this working draft of a full-length stage play that functions as part-science-fiction adventure, part-spiritual-parable. As the process of playwriting is a complex array of research, outlining, drafting, revising and editing, the play is preceded by a craft essay detailing the playwright's inspiration, research, and narrative design. In order to complete this project, the playwright conducted research in the field of religious studies, focusing specifically on the phenomena of paranormal experiences through the lenses of psychology, sociology, and philosophy, asking questions such as: How and why do new religions arise? In what ways (narrative, content, structure, etc.) do these new religions reflect the spiritualist mythologies or religious institutions of the past? What do these similarities or differences say about the social, economic, or political atmospheres that give rise to such movements?
More specifically, this play works within the cross-section of religion/spirituality, mental illness, and UFO and other extra-terrestrial related anomalies to ask such questions as: What does it mean to be Human? What does it mean to be "alien" or Other? How do we internally and externally construct a binary between Humanness and Otherness, between Self and Other? How do we construct reality? In what ways does this anthropomorphize our conceptions of the Human or the Other? In what ways, specifically, may this affect our understanding or manifestation of mental illness, in ourself and others?
The play you see here is a final draft for the thesis, but is still in development elsewhere. Here is a brief log line (i.e. a short description of the general plot and conflict of a script) for the piece: Four sisters from a broken home must deal with the sudden discovery of their late father's communication with an extra-terrestrial race bearing a message of Love-and-Peace. When they, too, begin to communicate with the E.T.'s, they must juggle issues of mental illness, memory, and trauma all while outrunning a shadow government that will stop at nothing to uncover their secret.
More specifically, this play works within the cross-section of religion/spirituality, mental illness, and UFO and other extra-terrestrial related anomalies to ask such questions as: What does it mean to be Human? What does it mean to be "alien" or Other? How do we internally and externally construct a binary between Humanness and Otherness, between Self and Other? How do we construct reality? In what ways does this anthropomorphize our conceptions of the Human or the Other? In what ways, specifically, may this affect our understanding or manifestation of mental illness, in ourself and others?
The play you see here is a final draft for the thesis, but is still in development elsewhere. Here is a brief log line (i.e. a short description of the general plot and conflict of a script) for the piece: Four sisters from a broken home must deal with the sudden discovery of their late father's communication with an extra-terrestrial race bearing a message of Love-and-Peace. When they, too, begin to communicate with the E.T.'s, they must juggle issues of mental illness, memory, and trauma all while outrunning a shadow government that will stop at nothing to uncover their secret.
ContributorsFields, Savannah (Author) / Sterling, Pamela (Thesis director) / Reyes, Guillermo (Committee member) / Department of English (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2018-12
Description
This thesis advocated for a humanities-forward bioethics in order to promote more robust discussion, foster public involvement in research, and enrich scientific education. Furthermore, embracing a field founded on personal expression allows for a wider breadth of concerns to be considered, not just those that are able to be articulated in strictly technical terms. Speculative fiction liberates discussion from being constrained by what is presently feasible, and thus works to place societal and ethical deliberation ahead of scientific conception. The value of such stories is not tied to any one character or storyline, but rather it is derived from our ability as a culture with a shared understanding to superimpose our concerns and fears onto the novels and use them as a means of communication. Three famous science fiction novels- The Island of Dr. Moreau, Frankenstein, and Brave New World- were analyzed to illustrate the salience of science fiction to contend with fundamental issues in bioethics.
ContributorsVarda, Nicole Elizabeth (Author) / Hurlbut, Benjamin (Thesis director) / Stanford, Michael (Committee member) / Maynard, Andrew (Committee member) / School of Life Sciences (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2020-12
Description
The purpose of this honors thesis project is to explore the origins of science fiction and fantasy in British literature and develop a unit for a high school Freshman English classroom. Focusing on science fiction and fantasy literature, technology, and literature circles, this is a complete unit in which all lesson plans, activities, and materials are derived from the PUHSD curriculum and support the AZ Career and College Readiness Standards. The design of this unit encourages analysis of literature and other medias as well as encouraging students to explore their own imaginations.
ContributorsJohnson, Taylor G. (Author) / Smudde, Christopher (Thesis director) / Blasingame, James (Committee member) / Division of Teacher Preparation (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-05
Description
This paper analyzes the television show Star Trek: Deep Space Nine within the context of the other Trek series, especially the original series and Star Trek: The Next Generation, with a particular focus on multiculturalism. Previous Trek series present an image of the United Federation of Planets that has evolved into a peaceful, cooperative, post-scarcity, multicultural utopia, but gloss over the difficulties the Federation governments must have faced in creating this utopia and must still face in maintaining it. I argue that DS9’s shift in focus away from exploration and towards a postcolonial, multicultural, stationary setting allows the show to interrogate the nature of the Federation’s multicultural utopia and showcase the difficulties in living in and managing a space with a plurality of cultures. The series, much more than those that precede and follow it, both directly and indirectly criticizes the Federation and its policies, suggesting that its utopian identity is based more in assimilation than multiculturalism. Nonetheless, this criticism, which is frequently abandoned and even undermined, is inconsistent. By focusing on three of the show’s contested spaces/settings—the space station itself, the wormhole, and the demilitarized zone—I analyze the ways in which DS9’s ambivalent criticism of the success of multiculturalism challenges the confidence of the Trek tradition.
ContributorsPoterack, Vivien Eulalie (Author) / Free, Melissa (Thesis director) / Sandlin, Jennifer (Committee member) / Department of English (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-05
Description
Capstone project, I began developing an animated series called Legends of Gaia. The show follows a small group of people of mixed ages and backgrounds, as they travel across the world trying to stop the Galliean Empire, a technologically booming western power that has begun fighting a war for world domination. The purpose of this paper is to better explain the origins and inspirations of the mythology of my series, as well as the major two supernatural characters of my series, and the general geography (both physical and metaphysical) of the series. When first developing this series, I looked into the works of Joseph Campbell, as he wrote the book(s) on mythology in many ways. His most famous writings are probably the Hero's Journey and the Monomyth, the basic outline of the journey that most heroes go through, from the call ordinary world, to the call of the adventure, all the way to the hero returning (Campbell 211). Many classic examples of story telling follow the pattern Campbell outlined, and my work is no exception. However, I did not want my series to be a beat for beat retread of the Hero's Journey, and so some parts, such as the Refusal of the Call, when the hero rejects the adventure and befalls a tragedy, were skipped, while others, such as the resurrection, were realized in different ways. Using the Resurrection as an example, in my series the main female character, Diana is reborn twice throughout the series. Once in the final battle with the main villain into her true, goddess form, and the other when her battles are over, and she is reborn in her mortal form permanently.
ContributorsLopez, Richard (Author) / Collis, Adam (Thesis director) / Valenti, F. Miguel (Committee member) / Barzso, Tain (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts (Contributor) / College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (Contributor)
Created2012-12
Description
"Look Up" is a full length hip hop concept album that follows a day in the life of protagonist Ozy Mandias, except with a science fiction twist. He has been abducted by an alien who is going through his memories. The project includes a full length script and lyric companion as well as a package mood visuals to go along with the album.
ContributorsDurkin, Jonathan Joseph (Author) / Mantie, Roger (Thesis director) / Norby, Christopher (Committee member) / School of Earth and Space Exploration (Contributor) / W.P. Carey School of Business (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2018-05