William Edward Burghardt Du Bois believed that through the use of visual arts, Black Americans could cultivate a new collective social identity. It’s through the intentional and collaborative utilization of the visual arts that gifts one the agency to shape their own individual future. While he urged us to direct our understanding of the collective history of Black Americans here in this country, which he distinguishes as the intersection of being both African (Black) and American, he also urged us to seek insight from other cultures. This master’s thesis employs Du Bois’s views of the role art has in society. It examines the commonalities between Black Artistic expression in relation to critiquing one’s place in society and navigating the future, embodying themes within Afrofuturism, which is a theory that expresses notions of the individual Black identity, within the intersection of art and technology, to ultimately envision a liberated future. It can be argued that Black Americans, are having a semiotic experience with Japanese Anime and Manga when viewing them. Semiotics is a form of analysis focusing on how meaning is created, understood, and communicated between people. After their semiotic experience, they then take action by using visual arts and media to subvert preexisting narratives rooted in fatalistic realities.This thesis focuses on the prevalent and intentional use of signs and icons presented within Anime and Manga series, that are internalized by Black American Anime fans (Otaku), who then take an Afrofuturistic approach to how they perceive their place in the world, as well as envision possible futures. It is separated into three chapters, with the first being historical as it analyzes W.E.B Du Bois’s work. The second chapter points to contemporary Black Artists whose work is influenced by Japanese culture, Iona Rozeal Brown and John Jennings. Lastly, the final chapter defines what are both Anime and Manga and their influence today on Black Americans. To conclude, if one embarks on this internal journey, one can contribute towards creating a new collectively acceptable social identity that is not synonymous with fatalistic realities, through their appreciation of Anime, Manga, and Japanese culture.

In the United States, whole body vibration (WBV) affects approximately 6 million workers who regularly operate trucks, buses, heavy equipment, forklifts, planes, helicopters, small marine craft, high-speed crafts, and ships. Continuous exposure to excessive levels of vibration can cause irreversible damage to the human body. Prolonged exposure to whole body vibration has been linked to various adverse health outcomes including physiological effects, musculoskeletal disorders, as well as diseases of the nervous, digestive, and circulatory systems (Byeon et al., 2013).

There is a high prevalence of back pain among aircrew in the MH-60S community that can potentially jeopardize operational readiness and safety in the military. Questionnaire data for 884 aircrew personnel sitting on the left and right gunner seats of the MH-60S helicopter were collected from 11 September 2017 to 11 September 2018. 854 of the 884 aircrew (96.6%) responded that they experienced back pain. The average pain reported by aircrew personnel experiencing pain on a scale from 0 to 9 was 4.79 with a standard deviation of 1.84. Vibration data collected, using tri-axial seat pad accelerometers, showed that 89% of the flying events that were evaluated exceeded the American Conference of Governmental Industrial Hygienist (ACGIH) action level, defined as half of the threshold limit value, with 22% of the events exceeding the threshold limit value. The threshold limit value is the maximum level to which a healthy worker can be exposed day after day for a working lifetime without adverse effects.

Per the ISO 2631-1 standard, since each of the flying events had crest values greater than nine, the vibration dose value was calculated for this study. After calculating the vibration dose value for each of the flying events it was found that all 18 (100%) of the flying events exceeded the action limit and of those 44% of the flying events exceeded the limit value. Aircrew sitting in the current gunner seats have the potential to be exposed to whole body vibration exceeding both current ACGIH TLV and AL as well as ISO 2631-1 Limit and Action values.

In An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, the philosopher and novelist William Godwin raises the concern that the earth may one day “be in danger of becoming too populous,” a cataclysm for which “a remedy may then be necessary.” What this remedy will be, however, Godwin does not know. “Who can say,” he writes, “what remedies shall suggest themselves for so distant an inconvenience, time enough for practical application, and of which we may yet at this time have not the smallest idea?” As this passage makes clear, Godwin was alert to the possibility that the future could end up looking very different than the present. But this passage also makes clear that Godwin struggled to actually imagine what that future might look like.

In my dissertation I focus on the tension between this impulse to think about the future and the opposing inability, or unwillingness, to speculate on the specific social and technological conditions that might be extrapolated from the present. In doing so, I elucidate a genealogy of speculation that runs through the nonfiction of political philosophy, particularly that which appeared in England after the French Revolution. Godwin was not alone in his attention to the future, nor was he alone in his attention to population as a vector for projecting rational thought into the future. In addition to reading Godwin’s Political Justice, I attend to the major works of Mary Wollstonecraft and Thomas Malthus – in particular, Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark and An Essay on the Principle of Population. Like Godwin, Wollstonecraft and Malthus draw on a speculative imaginary in the course of analytic examination that itself often rejects, or at least resists, a mode of understanding based on speculation. Godwin’s concession that there may one day exist a remedy to the problem of overpopulation that cannot be imagined in the present betrays a speculative imaginary restrained by formal conventions and by speculation’s association with utopian dreaming.

Yet I argue that the fact that these thinkers do speculate in works of nonfiction political philosophy about the future using imagination signals the presence of a tradition of speculation grounded in a commitment to the real, one that runs parallel to the kinds of speculation found in Thomas More’s Utopia or Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. This commitment to the real is evident in some of the earliest science fiction and is indeed one that continues to structure science fiction today. The concept of the future that holds not just our hopes and dreams but the worlds of our own making is historically constructed and begins to emerge at the end of the eighteenth century. At a time when it seemed like the task of describing the world was one that necessitated conjecture, these thinkers took up speculation as a way to contend with a future they knew would be shaped not by imagination alone but by that fatal fusion of reason and imagination that can destroy worlds just as surely as it can build them.