EVX: Race and Resistance in Science Fiction, Part 1

In today’s world where the phrase Black Lives Matter has fueled a movement, Escape Velocity Extra examines depictions of race and racism in science fiction. From the original Star Trek episode "Let This Be Your Last Battlefield," through humanity’s treatment of “the Prawn” in District 9, science-fiction pop-culture has delivered a lens to our reality. This program, through experts in present day culture/Afro-futurism and celebrity actors, will explore where we have been, where we are now and where we are going.

Featuring:
andré carrington, Associate Professor of English at the University of California-Riverside, author of Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction

Isiah Lavender, Professor of English at the University of Georgia, author of Afrofuturism Rising: The Literary Prehistory of a Movement

De Witt Kilgore, Associate Professor of English at Indiana University: Bloomington, author of Astrofuturism: Science, Race, and Visions of Utopia in Space and “This Time for Africa!: Afrofuturism as Alternate (American) History” in Afrofuturism in Time and Space, edited by Lisa Yaszek and Isiah Lavender III (forthcoming from Ohio State University Press).

Lisa Yaszek Regents Professor of Science Fiction Studies at Georgia Tech, author of Literary Afrofuturism in the Twenty-First Century