English 90ri. Race in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

Instructor: Maria Dikcis
Wednesday, 12:45-2:45pm | Location: Barker 018
Enrollment: Limited to 15 students
Course Site

Who gets to count as human? This ostensibly simple question has been complicated anew in the 20th and 21st centuries by a series of historical events and cultural representations that have racialized people of color as robots, unfeeling machines, and other synthetic forms of life. In this seminar, we will explore the fractured, queer affinities between race and artificial intelligence by considering, on the one hand, how racialized subjects have been stigmatized or oppressed through comparisons with machinic forms of life and, on the other hand, how AI has become a productive means for people of color to envision new modes of expressing emotions, sustaining communities, and challenging racism. Throughout, we will examine a wide range of literary genres—including poetry, fiction, memoir, and comics—as well as a selection of sci-fi films and new media artworks. Our explorations will start well before the digital age, in the year 1946, as we look to the graphic memoir Citizen 13660 by Miné Okubo, which documents the daily life of Japanese internment camps and serves as an early inquiry into the racialization of Asian Americans as mechanized laborers and clones. We will conclude with Stephanie Dinkins’ artworks Conversations with Bina48 and Not the Only One, which over seventy-five years later explore how Black cultural practices, community formations, and storytelling methods can resist and re-code the exclusionary histories of artificial intelligence systems. For the final project, students will have the option to produce an AI prototype oriented towards racial justice (no prior technical knowledge required).

This course satisfies the “1900-2000 Guided Elective" requirement for English concentrators and Secondary Field students.