19/06/2026 10:30-12:00
HHU, 23.21.U1.95
Moderation: Lucas Mattila (HHU)
Guest lecture in the seminar ‘The Machine Artificial Intelligence and Art in Contemporary Anglophone Literature’
Artificial Intelligence produced works pose a plethora of questions to the value and formation of art. More often than not, these discussions often center Euro- and Ameri-centric perspectives in the Anglophone world, as they disproportionately impact the world through the development and use of AI. More than perhaps any discourse, science fiction and speculative fiction literature written about AI has steered the cultural imaginations of what capacities AI may have. Within these norm-forming discourses, Afrofuturist works afford the potential to criticize and shape discourses on AI without necessarily reifying hegemonic discourse.
In her talk, HHU-Alumna Dr. Christina Slopek-Hauff will present some of her current research on the intersection of Afrofuturism and AI, diving into Nalo Hopkinson's Midnight Robber (2000). Exploring how the novel prefigures extensions and usages of artificial intelligences actually taking shape today, more than a quarter of a century later, the paper affirms the relevance of Afrofuturist cultural and literary production and the critical questions it raises. By means of its construction of extraterrestrial quasi-human, cyborg characters and their relations to non-human animals, Midnight Robber asks: What is a human? What is a person? How do advances in technology reshape the human subject? Grappling with these issues, the talk will highlight the pluralizing and critical thrust of Afrofuturist representation and localized shaping of 'AI' while considering the ethical ambivalence of society's saturation by technology, as imagined in Midnight Robber.
Christina Slopek-Hauff works as a postdoctoral researcher in the section of British Literary Studies at TU Dortmund University. She completed her doctoral degree at Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf (2021-2025), where she was employed in the section of Anglophone Literatures / Literary Translation from 2019 to 2025. Christina Slopek-Hauff has conducted intensive research and taught courses on Anglophone and postcolonial literatures; queer and gender studies; medical humanities and literary disability studies as well as ecocriticism. She has published in Anglia, Gender Forum, Postcolonial Text, Storyworlds, Praxis Englisch and with Brill. Her dissertation, Plural Psychologies: Interrogating Mental Illness in Anglophone African and African-diasporic Fiction, was nominated for multiple awards, won the prestigious drupa award 2026 and will be published with Brill in 2026. She is co-editor of Participation in Postcolonial Wor(l)ds: Literatures for, on or against the Global Literary Market, which will come out with Routledge next month. For her postdoctoral project, Christina Slopek-Hauff is taking a diachronic look at queer representation in British literatures from the 19th to the 21st century.