Date of Award

2016

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Social Sciences

First Advisor

Zabriskie, Queen

Area of Concentration

African Diaspora Studies

Abstract

This thesis analyzes the representations of racialized intimacy in two Afrofuturistic works: “The Comet” written by W.E.B Du Bois and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine created by Michel Piller and Rick Berman. Afrofuturism is both a genre of black cultural production and an analytical framework for critiquing discourses about the future. Afrofuturistic works and analyses interrogate and critique the construction of contemporary racial identities by envisioning how racialized subjects might function in imagined futures. The works I analyze in this thesis offer critiques and revisions of dominant discourses about interracial intimacy in their respective time periods as well as the future. Intimacy has historically been a site of traumatic racial formation, and the legal and extralegal violence that prohibited interracial intimacy has served as the foundation for white supremacy in the US. Dominant discourses about interracial intimacy, however, don't fully take into account this history as well as the continued racialization of intimacy. Instead, increasing acceptability and frequency of interracial intimacy are at times viewed as a signs of racial progress. This thesis challenges these dominant discourses by focusing on the centrality of violence to representations of blackness and how violence shapes the possibilities for intimacy between racialized subjects in the imagined futures of "The Comet" and Deep Space Nine. Drawing on historical analysis and racial formation theory, I argue that these works are in critical conversation with the dominant racial ideologies of the pre- and post-civil rights periods. Ultimately, these works offer alternative conceptions of interracial intimacy in the future that focus on and critique the structural forces that shape intimate possibilities.

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