johnsohn

[johnsohn]

Blog Assignment #6

My senior year has had some cool parts, but this Afrofuturism class has been one of the best. Every day felt like diving headfirst into another universe, but still connecting back to real-life, real-time stuff that matters. One Thursday, we were all strapped in as the teacher blasted this classic Missy Elliott video—chrome outfits, upside-down camera angles, the whole nine yards. In that moment, it hit me that Black artists have been doing "futuristic" longer than and better than Hollywood ever has. Right after all that hype, the teacher hit us with the "This is all due Sunday by 11:59 p.m., no excuses unless you’re absolutely on top of things" line that every good professor has in their arsenal.

Our Conversations When the Electricians Were Here—Husky Productions Said it Would Take Five Days; It Took Five Weeks—Roger and I as Twin Sons of Different Mothers (an Uneasy Alliance): While Husky Productions wired our set for live music, we held conversations that kept circling back to Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower and the line "God Is Change." For me, that quote turned mental sticky note during conversations about climate disasters or social chaos. In our Student Showcase, Jenna read pages from her story "Omi Nira," where pregnancy doesn’t exist anymore, and society has been turned inside out because of it. Listening to her read made me realize that the dystopias we invent and inhabit are as much about the control of our bodies as they are about big ideas or, um, big guns.

Everything is also threaded with music. My friend Steven synthesized this Parable track that sounded like a heartbeat under a burning sky. We likened it to Sun Ra’s cosmic jazz and Herbie Hancock’s funky robot song “Rockit.” Suddenly, I began to hear not just this one track but all kinds of music I love���Beyoncé’s Renaissance, for example—as vibrant with Afrofuturist alternate reality. This was the worm that got into my brain.

Our professor keeps saying, “You’re not just critics—you’re creators.” She even tells us we can shoot movies on our phones. That lit a fire under me. I’m drafting a short story about a girl who hacks abandoned payphones so they spill secrets from the future. After all these doomsday stories, I want to write an ending where people make it—because if this class taught me anything, it’s that imagining better futures is half the battle.

[johnsohn]

Blog Assignment #5

Lectures on Tuesday and Thursday felt like one big master-class on how Afrofuturism uses speculative stories to pick apart real-world power issues and on how we're expected to write about those ideas for the final project. On Tuesday, the professor showed how District 9 tries to mirror South African apartheid but stumbles into a white-savior setup by centering a clueless Afrikaner bureaucrat, Wikus, instead of any black protagonist. The moment Wikus begins mutating, the humans instantly downgrade him from boss to medical specimen, proving how fast societies can other someone the second they slide outside the dominant category. Yet the movie's empathy gap shows most clearly in its cartoonish Nigerians, whom it paints as cannibal gangsters led by a witch-doctor named after a real president. A move our professor called flat-out xenophobic. Altogether, the film became a cautionary tale: good intentions don't excuse sloppy metaphors or hurtful caricatures.

Thursday flipped the lens from aliens to vampires. Ryan Coogler’s new film Sinners sets blood-drinkers loose in a Jim-Crow-era juke joint and uses that supernatural hook to talk about cultural vampirism. How America loves Black music yet drains the people who create it. The juke-joint sequence wowed the prof because it frames sharecroppers not as background labor but as three-dimensional folks who flirt, joke, and rush to finish their cotton quotas before clocking out for music and moonshine. That simple humanization does more than most Hollywood period pieces ever have. By collapsing past, present, and future into one sweaty dance floor, Coogler nails what the class calls Afrofuturism’s all-at-once time logic.

We ended by reading Nalo Hopkinson's Greedy Choke Puppy, which trades the stereotypical Euro-gothic vampire for the Caribbean sukuyan. A fiery spirit that slips through keyholes to steal a baby's breath. The sukuyan, like vampires everywhere, is a manifestation of myth, which communities craft to wrestle with the kinds of tragedies that leave us floundering for an explanation, like unexpected crib death, when science feels too taut and cold to satisfy our grieving hearts. And I'm going to argue that this is a good transition into Afrofuturism, which we talked about last week.

Across both days, the takeaway was clear. Whether we’re judging alien camps in Johannesburg or neon-lit delta vampires, we have to ask who gets centered, who gets flattened, and why. Our essays need to do the same work. State a sharp thesis, marshal evidence, and stay alert to nuance because, as the rubric warns, this final project is our final exam on ethical world-building and critical writing rolled into one.

[johnsohn]

Blog Assignment #4

This week, our class has revolved around three major threads. One is about AI, how we handle it, and how we might as well handle it in our professional lives down the road. Another is about final projects, how we get from weak drafts to strong, even revelatory, completed arguments. The other thread is speculative fiction, what it is, what it's good for, and why, if we're not writing it ourselves, we should at least be reading it.

To start, our professor drove into us the idea that tools such as ChatGPT or DeepSeek should be viewed as research starters, not cheat codes. We explored the matter of how large-language models hallucinate citations and why that can turn a paper or even a court case into a "#not my fault!" situation. We discussed the staggering amount of water and electricity that AI farms consume: The AIs need to be fed, too. TL;DR of the class felt like it could be recited in one line: Double-check every AI-generated fact and link, and remember that if you try to pass off a bot's prose as your own, you're committing plagiarism.

Second, we went into detail on the mechanics of the last assignment. No matter if you're writing a 1,800-word essay or producing a short film or story, the 750-word rationale is the heaviest-weighted part. At least 75% of that rationale has to be an analysis of three class works and their themes. Anything less bleeds points. The professor's hack: write the rationale first so you don't get all caught up in filming or drafting and end up gushing about your project instead of citing course texts. Essay-track students were told to root their main argument in the rule of three. Three subtopics (say, violence, technology, or hope) and three concrete examples from each work, plus two scholarly sources that talk about the works, not just big ideas in general.

At last, this week’s session veered into the territory of alternate histories and Afrofuturism. After roasting the 1995 film White Man’s Burden for its shallow premise of switching roles, we welcomed novelist and screenwriter Stephen Barnes, who explained the extensive research done over many years that went into his book Lion’s Blood. In it, he postulates a very different America. To build this story, he relied on geographical advantages: the east-west trade lines are much better for development than the north-south lines. Horses are so much better for development in places where horses live than zebras that can’t be tamed. He also relied on some cultural factors: you’d get a much more civilized society from an Islamic colonization than from a European one.

A pattern that keeps emerging across all these conversations is that our professor wants us to marry creativity with rigor. Testing AI outputs, outlining an essay, or reframing the Atlantic slave trade. Whatever the task, the mantra is the same: verify sources, trace the why, and show the work. 

[johnsohn]

Blog Assignment #3

This week made me think about how memory, identity, and survival cohere in the works we’ve been studying. Daughters of the Dust was probably the most visually stunning film I’ve ever seen. But it was also one of the most meaningful films. At first, it was a little hard to follow because it doesn’t have a typical plot or storyline. But once I wrapped my head around the fact that it’s more like a visual poem, everything started to make sense. The way it centers around family and tradition, and an unborn child as the narrator, made me think about the past, present, and future all coexisting together. It centers around the idea that to move forward, you have to remember where you come from.

We watched The Brother from Another Planet. Which I thought was different in style, but still touched on a lot of the same ideas. Even though the protagonist can't speak, I felt like that made his experiences even more powerful. He was judged and treated as an outsider, yet he still helped people and tried to do the right thing. That movie made me reflect on how people who feel like they don't belong still find ways to survive, adapt, and make connections. It also made me realize that silence can be just as expressive as words.

This week, music also played a massive part, particularly when we were discussing the likes of Miles Davis's Bitches Brew and artists such as Janelle Monáe. I had no idea that Afrofuturism could encompass music. It's not purely about sci-fi or fantasy. It is about envisioning groundbreaking new realities for Black people across all sorts of creative media. When I found out that Beyoncé's Lemonade was influenced by Daughters of the Dust, everything came together for me. I now see that the artists of today are still using the past like a pigment in the paintbrush of their quilted lives. They're constructing the kinds of futures they want to see. Futures that are much more full of possibilities than the ones many of us are living today.

Now everything is making me reconsider my approach to the final project. I plan to make it reflect the themes of memory, identity, and transformation that we've been studying. The pieces we've examined haven't just aided my comprehension of Afrofuturism. They've also catalyzed my considering how art serves as an almost ineffable bridge to understanding both personal and collective identity.

[johnsohn]

Blog Assignment #2

Two real-life problems create the necessity for my Earthseed community. One is climate change, which is causing life to become unstable in ever-increasing ways, through such manifestations as wildfires, floods, and food shortages. The other is massive, and massively growing, economic inequality. Which I think is forcing tens of millions of people into homelessness and creating the conditions in which most of us cannot live safe, healthy lives unless we band together in new kinds of communities.

Two Earthseed verses from Parable of the Sower inspire my community.

"All that you touch You Change. All that you Change Changes you." We will teach everyone farming, building, and leadership, because participation will shape our community and the community will shape them.

"God is Change." — We will build structures that can be moved, adapted, or repurposed quickly in case of new environmental threats, embracing change instead of fearing it.

I will establish my Earthseed community in the Pacific Northwest, close to the coast yet above sea level. The regional climate includes ample rain and fertile land, reduced temperatures relative to other parts of the country, and the natural shelter provided by the forests.

Anyone can become a part of our community if they are ready to work, learn, and safeguard others. Willingness to cooperate is a must. Uncooperative, violent people, or those seeking to dominate others, will be shown the door to protect our vital trust and balance. Also, if they have any sort of criminal records, they will be out!

The leadership model we will use is a council of volunteers that the community votes for. Every six months, we change the council to prevent any particular person from gaining too much power and possibly leading to tyranny.

A forthcoming technology we will invent is SolarWebs. It is an ultra-thin, flexible solar panel that can stretch across gardens, homes, and walkways. Examples like spider silk can collect energy all day without blocking much sunlight from reaching plants. They will power water filtration, food refrigeration, and heat without depending on a big power grid.

Our Earthseed community will continue to thrive by planting a broad variety of crops, hunting and fishing in a sustainable manner, and storing food in underground coolers that are cool, dark, and dry for emergency situations. We will train all of our members in performing first aid, basic self-defense, and several useful trades like farming, carpentry, and medicine. So it never has to fall back on being helpless when specialists are lost to injury or death.

To build a more promising tomorrow, we will establish Earthseed Schools, imparting knowledge necessary for living and thriving, together with science and ethics, to students of every age. We are investing now in conserving the soil and water. Even after many years, these investments in the health of the land will still be paying off, benefitting our children and grandchildren.