Writing the (im)possible: on Pleasure, Love, and Afro-Indigenous Futures is an offering, ceremony, and invitation to imagine what has often been regarded as (im)possible: to write a world where Black, indigenous, and all oppressed people are free. In this course, we will work toward a decolonial framework as we explore the dimensions of pleasure, love, and futurism. To do so, we will interrogate the imperial-colonial-racial capitalist-heteropatriarchal histories and ongoing realities that shape our modern world. We will engage a range of works from conventional academic works to non-academic works, including but not limited to visual art, literature, performance art, poetry, and dance. Our purpose in engaging this range of works is to examine the intersections of language, imagination, and power from multiple angles as we develop our writing. Our course will engage love, pleasure, and future through multiple registers that will demand us to use our imaginations and creativity to invent freedom where it has often been denied. Students will be invited to practice their imaginations by engaging in a variety of written forms both traditional and experimental. Most of all in this course we will think together, we will challenge our ideas together, and we will do the work of imagining “education as the practice of freedom” (Freire, 1972). Writing 1 is an introduction to college-level writing, reading, and discussion. Initial writing assignments will involve students with language as a personally expressive, creative, and imaginative medium. Later assignments will bring this expressiveness to bear on practical writing tasks typical of college-level work: research, analysis,argument, etc. Reading is designed to stimulate discussion and present models for the students'own writing. Although writing and reading are the main emphases, attention will also be given to informal discussion and oral presentation.

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