1. Electric Peoples:
Towards an Afrofuturist Body Politic
Christian Keeve
African-American Studies
MMUF
May 28, 2015
2. Examining the speculative body as a
site of possibility through which we can
critique posthumanism, queer thinking,
corporality
Speculation as tool for deconstructing
of spatial, temporal, social, and
embodied binaries
Radical speculation at the intersection
of Blackness, Queerness, and Disability
Afrofuturist body political ethic
Calvin Ellis
Action Comics – V2#9
3. Monica Rambeau
Nextwave #11
Points of Analysis
Pop cultural production as
reflection of popular
psyche
Mixed media covering
North American cultural
trends over the past half
century
Rethinking of cultural
archives through digital
Humanities
4.
5. Post/Modern
Transcendence over
Modernity and
embodiment of
abstraction
Superhero as locus of
ambiguity, uncertainty,
and critique
Post/Colonial
Writing back to the
center; reclaiming
colonial cultural
products
Refutation of
ahistoricity
Post/Human
Embodied Futurity
through
Technological
advancement
Impossibility for non-
human forms
Afro/Futurist
• Reclamation and reimagining of Black super-body
• Electricity and Android embodiment making Black super-body site of
construction of imagined futures
• Mythological remixes break boundaries of the Technological and the
Divine, and complicate notions of American Superheroic pantheon
6. Posthumanism
and the Politics
of (Im)Possibility
Liberal
Humanist
MAN
Posthumanism
Biological
porosity
Dynamic
multiplicity
of self
Negotiation
along
spectra of
in/super-
humanity
7. What happens to discourses
around disability, size,
gender non-conformity, and
embodied otherness in the
face of liberal
(post)humanist Man?
8. As we gain the freedom to
imagine our own spaces
and construct brand new
bodies within them, which
bodies are prioritized and
which are erased?
9. To what extent does the
Superhuman/Supernatural
offer a necessary and
constructive critique of
normative views on what is
human and what is natural?
10. Thank You! Summer Research
Opportunity
Program
~~
Mellon Mays
Undergraduate
Fellowship
Michelle Wright
Alexander Weheliye
Courtney Patterson
