# data[].attributes.headline
Introduce yourself to the class (use pictures, record a video, show us your pets, your favorite foods, and your favorite spaces)

# data[].attributes.subject
Introduce yourself to the class (use pictures, record a video, show us your pets, your favorite foods, and your favorite spaces)

# data[].attributes.body
Hello everyone! My name is Grace Kranz, and I’m currently a Graduate Teaching Assistant at MNSU as well as a staff writer for a series of newspapers in southern Minnesota (Lake Crystal Tribune, Madelia Times Messenger, etc). I live in downtown Mankato with my boyfriend and our two cats, Daniel and Ernie. :) Ernie is really into hunting bugs and hiding toys in our shoes, while Daniel prefers to sleep in laps and chase strings… this can be a problem when I knit, as Daniel often becomes entangled in my yarn and begins to panic.

My favorite food is Vietnamese chicken curry, which I tried for the first time at a Vietnamese restaurant in Reykjavik, Iceland. The owners used to be good friends with American chess grandmaster Bobby Fischer when he lived there, which was really cool to hear about. They even had a framed picture of him in their restaurant.

I enjoy taking walks in the morning (in all months but winter), so my favorite place has become the Rasmussen Woods here in Mankato. Walking along the same trail consistently has allowed me to notice where a family of deer like to sleep and play, meet a horse named Gabby (her owner feeds her at the same time each morning), and watch squirrels and chipmunks scurry around their respective homes. One squirrel yells at me everytime I pass, but that just adds to the charm of the walk.

# data[].attributes.headline
Bobby Fischer @ Pho Vietnamese in Reykjavík

# data[].attributes.subject
Bobby Fischer @ Pho Vietnamese in Reykjavík

# data[].attributes.headline
Introduce your student/professional self to the class (what do you do? What do you want to do? Why are you in this class? What do you hope to get out of it?)

# data[].attributes.subject
Introduce your student/professional self to the class (what do you do? What do you want to do? Why are you in this class? What do you hope to get out of it?)

# data[].attributes.body
This is my second year teaching English 101 at MNSU, and I’ve been writing for the newspapers for about one year now. I’d like to become a professor, and hope to teach at the community college level. I’m currently debating if I want to get my PhD or not, so if anyone has any advice I’d really appreciate it! I wanted to take this class because the treatment of gender in literature is something I’ve never explicitly studied before, which is crazy! I’ve also never studied, or heard about, Afrofuturism or Africanfuturism. I think the content of  this course is going to be completely new to me, and I’m excited to learn about it and figure out how to connect it to my areas of interest (ecocriticism and posthumanism).

# data[].attributes.headline
Connect the first two bullet points to your larger community/social/cultural contexts (what matters to you? What are the things that worry you? What is your home language? How/when/where do you use that language? Academic language? Social media language? How does class intersect with your passions, your worries, and your life?)

# data[].attributes.subject
Connect the first two bullet points to your larger community/social/cultural contexts (what matters to you? What are the things that worry you? What is your home language? How/when/where do you use that language? Academic language? Social media language? How does class intersect with your passions, your worries, and your life?)

# data[].attributes.body
Something that both matters to me and worries me is the impact technology has on mental health and social relations. I worry that the addictive-nature of social media, streaming services, and gaming is damaging to our ability to feel fulfilled in the physical world, and impedes our desire to make an effort in our careers, friendships, and community. I think that this class may provide me with a new perspective on how technology can be used as a tool of empowerment or optimism when fused with African culture, history, and mythology. I look forward to learning about how technology is portrayed through the lens of Africanfuturism!

# data[].attributes.headline
How and in what ways does what you read for Week 1 connect to the above bullets? How do the guiding questions and course goals intersect with your interests and why? 

# data[].attributes.subject
How and in what ways does what you read for Week 1 connect to the above bullets? How do the guiding questions and course goals intersect with your interests and why? 

# data[].attributes.body
I’m interested in technology, and I think “Egoli” by T.L. Huchu intersects well with that interest. On page 5 of this short story, the Shona woman finds solace in her smartphone, as it allows her to do and know everything she needs to without the help of previous traditions (such as the rainmaking ceremony that her village no longer performed). The Shona woman relies on her mobile to see her family, and it feels as if the mobile foreshadows the future: innovative, but lonely and foreign.

One of the course goals is to answer this question: What literatures and theories engage Africanfuturism? I suspect that a variety of the theoretical positions applied to the term “posthumanism” will engage with Africanfuturism. Specifically, I think the position that the boundaries dividing humans from technology are undermined may be at the forefront. The posthumanist idea that man is not autonomous but rather linked to nature is something I could see being explored in Africanfuturism. In Okorafor’s “Africanfuturism Defined”, she writes that “Africanfuturism is similar to ‘Afrofuturism’ in the way that blacks on the continent and in the Black Diaspora are all connected by blood, spirit, history and future.” I think this portrays a dissolution of the idea that man is autonomous. “Afrofuturism, Africanfuturism, and the Language of Black Speculative Literature” by Hope Wabuke expresses the idea that the human will not be the centered point of investigation, but rather the concept of Blackness and how it is expressed. She writes, “The Africanfuturism written by Emecheta and Okorafor, like radical Black feminism, requires us to see fossilized systems of oppression and representation and reenvision the use of characters, narratives, themes, structures, forms, archetypes, mythos, languages, and perspective — and center Blackness in all of these ways.”