College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences

Through analysis of an educational short film, an oral history, and an sf television episode, each rehearsing human space flight, this article explores how Black women undertake the practical and imaginative tasks that make human habitation in space possible. These performances “fem[me] the future,” in the words of Afrofuturist artist and philanthropist Janelle Monáe. Nichelle Nichols’s science communications activism, Sharon McDougle’s oral history for NASA’s Johnson Space Center, and actor Dominique Tipper’s starring role in The Expanse all cast them as “space workers”: non-astronauts whose work renders the space age a pluralistic endeavor rather than a stage for reproducing heroic myths. Their roles emphasize the performative rather than constative meaning of “Black femme” to embody possible futures.

Black life in the modern world makes incisive demands on the cultural politics of imaginative fiction as well as social movement rhetoric. Recent scholarship supplements the ongoing efflorescence of Afrofuturist art by reconstructing the history of speculative, utopian, and cautionary tales in Black writing. Isiah Lavender's Afrofuturism Rising and Alex Zamalin's Black Utopia join a growing body of intellectual history prepared for the task of historicizing fantastic Black aesthetics. Sami Schalk's more contemporary intervention, Bodyminds Reimagined, demonstrates the integral value of Black women's speculative fiction to rethinking the role of dis/ability - conspicuously including the radical difference signified by "madness"- in the panoply of power relations that stand to be transformed by Black radical thought in action.

In 2014, Amanda Thomashow filed a complaint against Larry Nassar at Michigan State University. In its report describing the ensuing investigation, the university cleared Nassar of wrongdoing. A few years later, Nassar was sent to prison for abusing hundreds of girls and women. This essay takes a close look at the report describing that investigation’s finding. Drawing from Miranda Fricker’s work on epistemic injustice, this essay considers the sexual politics of knowing and unknowing within the context of a Title IX investigation set against the backdrop of a university’s attempt to overhaul not only its policies but its sexual culture.

Abstract The socially symbolic figure of the superhero comes into close contact with vernacular intellectual critiques of race and modernity through the much-anticipated film adaptation of Marvel’s Black Panther comics. This article analyzes the implications for queer approaches to black popular cultural production of the knowledge practices that inspire Black Panther’s depiction of an African utopia. The intertexts involved include histories, travel writings, and other comics. Focusing on the divergent treatments by authors Christopher Priest (1998–2003) and Ta-Nehisi Coates (2016) of the title character’s black female comrades-in-arms, this reading interrogates how race consciousness and colonial legacies inform the discourses of desire operating within the text. The term desiring blackness describes an orientation to reading that defers to African Americanist and black diasporic considerations to ground the task of interpretation in conditions that elicit compromise among disparate lines of theoretical inquiry: queer phenomenology, decolonial epistemology, Afrofuturism, and queer of color critique.

Abstract Literature in Singapore is written in the country’s four official languages: Chinese, English, Malay, and Tamil. The various literatures flourished in the late 19th and early 20th centuries with the rise of print culture in the British colony, but after independence in 1965, English became emphasized in both the education system and society at large as part of the new government’s attempts to modernize the country. Chinese, Malay, and Tamil were seen as mother tongue languages to provide Singaporeans with cultural ballast while English was regarded as a language for administration, business, and scientific and technological development. Correspondingly, literatures in other languages than English reached a plateau in terms of writerly output and readership during the 1970s and 1980s. However, since 1999, with the state’s implementation of the Renaissance City Plan to revitalize arts and culture in Singapore, there have been various initiatives to increase the visibility of contemporary Singaporean writing both within the country itself and on an international scale. Translation plays a key role in bridging the linguistic and literary divides wrought by the state’s mother tongue policies, with several works by Cultural Medallion winners in different languages translated into English, which remains at present the shared language in Singapore. Literary anthologies are also invaluable forms through which the concepts of a national literature and national identity are expressed and negotiated. A number of anthologies involving Singaporean authors and those from other countries also highlight the growing international presence of and interest in Singaporean literature. Several anthologies also focus on the topic of urban space, city life, and the rapid transformation of Singapore’s physical environment. Writings about gender and sexuality have also become more prominent in single-author collections or edited anthologies, with writers exploring various inventive and experimental narrative forms. A number of poets and writers are also established playwrights, and theater has historically been and continues to be an extremely vital form of creative expression and cultural production. Graphic novels, crime and noir fiction, and speculative and science fiction publications are also on the rise, with the awarding of the Singapore Literature Prize to Sonny Liew’s The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye signaling that these genres merit serious literary consideration. A number of literary publications and materials related to Singaporean literature can be found on the Internet, such as the journal Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, the website Singapore Poetry, and the database Poetry.sg. Various nonprofit organizations are also working toward increasing public awareness about literature through events such as Singapore Poetry Writing Month, the Migrant Worker Poetry Competition, the Singapore Writers Festival and National Poetry Festival, and also through projects that exhibit poetry in train stations and on public thoroughfares.