Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 2012, American Culture Studies/Popular Culture

The purpose of this study is to investigate and analyze African-American participation in science fiction fan culture at science fiction conventions. My inquiry will include four main sections involving how and why African-Americans seem to be underrepresented at science fiction conventions in comparison to their proportion of the general population. These include a brief history of science fiction conventions, an exploration of the possible reasons for African- Americans who read science fiction literature or watch the television shows and movies would chose not to participate in science fiction conventions, some examples of positive portrayals of black characters in both science fiction literature and visual media, and the personal observations of my research subjects on their experiences regarding attending science fiction conventions. My research methodology included personal interviews with several African-American science fiction fans and authors, an interview with a white science fiction fan who is very familiar with the history of fan culture. I also draw upon scholarship in the science fiction studies, cultural anthropology and critical race theory.

Committee: Esther Clinton PhD (Committee Chair); Ellen Berry PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: African American Studies

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2020, English

This dissertation examines how recent works of Black apocalyptic fiction represent the opportunities and limits of crisis as a driver of radical social change. Black apocalyptic fiction deals explicitly and substantively with what it means to be Black during, and in the aftermath of, apocalypse. It is a subset of the genre of Black speculative fiction, a broad category for texts by the African diaspora that resist purely realist or mimetic representation of the world and encompasses several genres, most commonly science fiction, fantasy, magical realism, and horror. Black speculative fiction has garnered considerable academic interest in recent years and has been recognized as a rich site for analyzing race and racial differences in popular culture. This project joins the emerging critical conversation of scholars such as Isiah Lavender III, Ramon Saldivar, Lisa Yaszek, and Marleen Barr, to analyze how Black writers engage with, challenge, and revise the conventions of the speculative genres. However, critical engagement with apocalypse in Black speculative fiction is still relatively sparse, as is scholarship addressing the representations of race and gender in Black apocalyptic fiction. Using intersectionality as a theoretical framework, I address this gap in current scholarship through a sustained consideration of Black apocalyptic fiction and the intersections of race and gender therein. This dissertation begins to answer the question of how race and gender impact the potential for radical change in the wake of extreme crisis. Literary representations of apocalypse provide one form of what Nnedi Okorafor calls “the distancing and associating effect” of science fiction. They depict familiar spaces made strange through the lens of total destruction. Apocalypse narratives have a long history and have served many functions over time, including articulation of societal anxieties, social critique, and utopian striving. Black apocalyptic fiction extends this (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Martin Ponce (Advisor); Lynn Itagaki (Committee Member); Brian McHale (Committee Member) Subjects: African American Studies; African Americans; African Literature; American Literature; Black History; Black Studies; Ethnic Studies; Gender; Literature; Minority and Ethnic Groups; Modern Literature

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2020, Mass Communication (Communication)

This dissertation investigates how Netflix's Black Mirror (2011—) articulates both the technology/human interconnectedness and a varied array of posthuman subjects within the narrative. I engage with posthumanist theory and utilize narrative rhetorical criticism and the method of articulation to analyze a selection of ten episodes. Based on the textual analysis, I contend that each selected narrative reveals a unique hypothetical scenario that questions the humanist conceptualization of human nature in addition to envisioning potentials for challenging the common understanding of self, identity, subjectivity, and agency. With its controversial and multilayered articulations of the posthuman condition, I propose that this quality science fiction television program takes as its central theme the symbiotic technology/human relationship as the kernel of a co-constructed reality between these two actants in the digital age. I suggest that Black Mirror introduces five shades of be(com)ing posthuman: be(com)ing alienated, be(com)ing cyborg, be(com)ing fractured, be(com)ing immortal, and be(com)ing human. Ultimately, I argue for an empathetic techno/human future that recognizes that both technology and humans matter and mutually influence one another in the construction of the techno/human subject that is unapologetically cyborg, hybrid, and posthuman such that it refuses to be categorically unadulterated and pure.

Committee: Suetzl Wolfgang (Advisor); Ng Eve (Committee Member); Aden Roger (Committee Member); Sheldon Myrna (Committee Member) Subjects: Mass Communications

Master of Humanities (MHum), Wright State University, 2007, Humanities

The main purpose of this thesis is to answer the question of why the genre of science fiction permits African-American authors to expand their themes beyond African-American concerns and characters. This thesis puts forward the argument that science fiction provides African-American writers with the capacity to craft their works' central conflicts to include or exclude issues that affect the Black community. This thesis answers the question in four points, the first being a brief historical overview of the debate within the Black literary community on the prevalence of Black aesthetics. The overview also gives a summary of the debate over the true definition of science fiction. The next three points comprise the main body of the text by giving examples of the diversity of issues explored by three selected authors: Samuel Delany, Octavia Butler, and Charles Johnson. The thesis concludes that science fiction offers a freedom to African-American writers that cannot be found in other genres of fiction because its subjects are not bound by the social and cultural norms of a reality-based world.

Committee: Ava Chamberlain (Advisor) Subjects:

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2006, English

This manuscript comparatively examines the production of speculative fiction by black women writers from Brazil, Jamaica, the United States and Canada. Examination of each text reveals the way in which black female subjectivity, African-based spiritual epistemology, and African diasporic spaces converge to create multiply liminal discourses, which are the counterhegemonic articulations of black agency—particularly through the use of African spiritual paradigms—in envisioning liberated futures. Multiply liminal discourse as an interpretive frame establishes the shared position of black female liminality and African epistemological frames of reference while remaining attendant to the particulars of difference generated by varied historical developments in African diasporic spaces. The examinations of the works within this text, utilizing multiply liminal discourse as an interpretive methodology, reveal the potential for enactment of “strategic essentialism” toward an integrated theoretical and practical liberatory discourse and politics. This occurs within the texts through reclaiming agency for black womanhood and black romantic relationships in Aline Franca's A Mulher de Aleduma; embracing African heritage particularly through one of the most demonized cultural legacies, African spirituality, in Erna Brodber's Louisiana and Nalo Hopkinson's Brown Girl in the Ring; and the expansive and inclusive vision of liberation ideology that embraces difference and change through Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents. This manuscript concludes by discussing the integration of ideology and activism through multiply liminal discourse, the ways in which speculative fiction enables that integration and ultimate implications for black liberation.

Committee: Valerie Lee (Advisor) Subjects:

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 2011, Popular Culture

This thesis explores how southern rap artists Lil Wayne and Andre 3000 use science fiction imagery to challenge narrow stereotypes and negative perceptions of what it means to be a black male hip hop artist while contributing to the genre, expanding the possibilities of hip hop‟s “commodified personas” (Bunten 2008). By focusing on southern hip hop artists, I shed light on the push/pull factors that these artists have had to transcend in order to authenticate themselves within the East Coast/West Coast binary of hip hop and to counter negative southern stereotypes. By embracing science fiction, alienation and Otherness, these artists change hip hop‟s geographical landscape of ghettocentricity to actively serve as a self-marketed cultural product. My research approach borrows from Stuart Hall‟s study of the traditions within the black repertoire in his article “What Is This Black‟ in Black Popular Culture?” (1992). He identifies the three main repertoires of black popular culture as an emphasis on style as the actual subject, the body as a canvas of representation and music as a focal point of the culture. These three categories work as the framework of my research and are used in tandem with explorations of the concepts alienation, Afro-futurism, and commodified personas as used applied to the analysis of the self-representations of Lil Wayne and Andre 3000.

Committee: Angela Nelson PhD (Advisor); Jeremy Wallach PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: African American Studies