Dr. Jasmine A. Strickland will be presenting a talk from her book project, Disaster and Possibility: Reclaiming Time through Black Horror Aesthetics. The project intervenes in the field of AfroHorror by unpacking the highly evocative and radical theorizations of Black existence that these horror stories offer. The heart of Afrospeculative fiction lies in the impulse toward the confrontation of loss due to historical gaps; since full reclamation of the lives of enslaved Africans and original purity is not possible, the speculation required in speculative fiction redresses the after- and before-lives of slavery. Dr. Strickland uses critical utopian theory and praxis to analyze engagements with AfroHorror genre fiction that stretch generic limitations to both undermine the assumed monstrosity of Black people as well as to pinpoint the very real monstrosity of the ongoing legacies of imperialism. Her intervention demonstrates that the Black utopian impulse opens spaces through encountering violence and terror while imbricating a methodology of reinvention. Each chapter of this project considers the utopian impulse within AfroHorror to disrupt and dismantle exploitative constructions of time and anti-black violence.

Jasmine Ann Strickland is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the USC Society of Fellows in the Humanities. She specializes is Black Speculative Fiction and Cultures from the Afrodiaspora. She received her PhD in English from the University of California, Riverside in 2024.

Event Details:

November 18, 2024

12:00-1:30PM

The Ide Room, THH 420