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. 

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.”