In a review of Boots Riley’s science-fiction inflected 2018 movie Sorry to Bother You, the Zambian fiction writer Namwali Serpell notes that sometimes the effort to describe something real can produce what seems like the opposite of realism: “To make something utterly literal pushes through to the other side of the real—this is why satire so often bleeds into surrealism, as in Kafka’s The Metamorphosis (a working man is a bug).” In this class, we will consider how and why a number of contemporary writers of color have turned to popular genres like crime fiction, science fiction, and horror to represent things that realism somehow fails to capture. Beginning with Toni Morrison’s 1987 Beloved—a highly esteemed work of literary fiction with a ghost story at its heart—and Octavia Butler’s 1993 Parable of the Sower—a work by a science fiction writer whose literary merits are only now being recognized—we'll move on to three 2020 novels: Silvia Moreno-Garcia's Mexican Gothic, N K Jemisin's The City We Became, and Stephen Graham Jones' The Only Good Indians. We'll also talk about the turn to popular genres in works by creators of color in other media, such as HBO's Watchmen and Lovecraft Country.

This is a writing intensive class, for which students will do a research project and several drafts of a paper based upon it. For these, I'm open to the possibility of students researching and writing about works not on the syllabus. If you like genre fiction, or fiction by writers of color, or both, and want to learn more (both inside and outside the classroom) about the contemporary intertwining of the two, please consider joining us!