In this episode, Jenna Hanchey and Erica Vital-Lazare – two scholars who study language – talk about the new voices needed to imagine new worlds.

Jenna Hanchey is an Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Nevada, Reno. Her research focuses on the neocolonialism of aid and volunteer work in Africa, and she is currently working on a project examining how Afrofuturist and Africanfuturist sci-fi imagines development in anti-colonial ways. 

Erica Vital-Lazare is a writer and a professor of creative writing at the College of Southern Nevada, where she teaches Marginalized Voices in Dystopian literature, and she is the editor of a forthcoming series revisiting classic Black works in literature titled Of the Diaspora with McSweeney’s Press.

DISCUSSED

Anticolonialism, “A Colonized Mind” (song) by Prince, Frantz Fanon (psychiatrist), oppression, colonialist structures, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o (scholar/author), psychological effects of colonization, home, materialism, nostalgia, old systems, M Archive: After the End of the World (book) by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Andrea Hairston (author), chaos, new worlds, Toni Morrison (author)