Paper short abstract:

African diasporas have long embraced speculative thought to propose the rules of their own modernity, their own aesthetics and their future while questioning their past. A haunting past. This paper analyses speculative or dystopian discourses and representations in Caribbean litterature.

Paper long abstract:

Afrofuturism questions the experience of Afro-descendant and African populations by mobilizing science fiction, fantasy or magic realism in its romantic form. In 1994, Mark Dery defined Afrofuturism as: “speculative fiction that deals with African-American themes […] An Afro-American semantics American society that seizes technological imagery and a prophetically augmented future". If Marc Dery's analysis applied to African-American realities, the development of speculative, utopian, paratopic, dystopian and even heterotopic discourses and representations in the Caribbean can also be perceived as an "imaginary sociology of our present" (L .V. Thomas), an imaginary sociology that questions the place of the Caribbean in the world, but also its past, its present and its future developments.

African diasporas have long embraced speculative thought to propose the rules of their own modernity, their own aesthetics and their future while questioning their past. A haunting past. The slavery past and the colonial conquests are the inspiration of many science fiction texts: tropes common stage the robot as a metaphor for the slave, much like accounts of conquests of other worlds and inhabited planets from extraterrestrial creatures are modeled on 19th-century European colonizations in Africa. A prophetic future? Caribbean write back. Ketty Stewart with her radio short story, entitled Eugenie grows up (58 min), Michael Roch, a Caribbean afrofuturist author for his novel, Tè Mawon and Nalo Hopkinson under with Brown Girl in the Ring , a novel recently adapted for the screen.

Paper short abstract:

Early 20th century prophetic leadership in South Africa articulated community models lost with the 1920s' "Natives" laws enforcements against their meetings. Prophets blended Christian and secular into one discourse in presenting a model of a future Afrotopia. Might it be recovered?

Paper long abstract:

Early 20th century South African prophetic leadership articulated models of community lost to South Africa today. A.A.S. le Fleur and his land-purchase operations; the myriad followers of Samuel Moroka; the acolytes and paid members of the International Commercial Workers' Union or ICU (I See You); the Witsieshoek and Rustenberg claims made by dauphins of attenuated historical kingdoms, and lastly, the Pentecostal and other "spirit" congregations, all flowered in the 1910s and 1920s. Their mobilizations of persons drew the legacy of twin-courts and agglomerative chiefdoms, and, on then-futuristic mission teachings and spatial orders (Genadendal, Kat River, Farmerfield, "Kuruman" and Thaba Nchu).

This paper finds ideas in common, outlines a resulting common-denominator politics of these leaders, and recovers a suggested spatial order and mode of authority for living. It will be seen that prophets blended Christian and secular into one discourse in this model, even, of course, Pentecostal ones. Their resulting collective future Afrotopia as a this-worldly idea was, at the time, dismissed or called mad by South African authorities. Prophets were pressed into a purely tribal model (meaning, the chiefly rural affairs permitted before the Bantu Authorities law), or purely Christian discourse (meaning, performative, personal, and eschatological).

The forgotten original is here recuperated, and presented as detour to a future not taken.

Paper short abstract:

African Indigenous Churches offer salvation, deferring ideal futures to transcendent realms, but they also alter life in this world. I analyze gatherings of the Nazareth Baptist Church, South Africa, as heterotopias of perfection that emplace and enact the vision of a redeemed Zululand.

Paper long abstract:

In Afrotopia (2019), Felwine Sarr advocates a cultural revolution in which “the future of humanity is on Africa’s side”. Intersecting indigeneity and cosmopolitanism, this utopian vision includes not only creating social transformation, but also recognizing sites where this is already happening. To break free from the epistemic straightjacket of colonality, Africa needs to mobilize its diverse cultural history and draw upon the “ontomythologies” of oral traditions and the “vitalism” of religious cosmologies, according to Sarr. Here, I analyze how an African Indigenous Church has contributed to such an Afrotopian becoming.

In 1910, Isaiah Shembe taught a new way to heaven to the people of South Africa. At the time when the colonial state had expropriated its African subjects, forced them in a migrant labor system, and customized their cultural traditions, Shembe claimed messianic status and redeemed the African ways of the forebears as well as the ancestors themselves within his very own version of Christianity, the Nazareth Baptist Church. Through apartheid and post-apartheid times, the church has subverted the hegemonic capitalistic social order, preaching a moral economy closely entangled with the formation of Zulu ethnicity. In my paper, I show how contemporary church assemblies materialize a transcendent Zululand, and how their atmosphere of hardship, respect and celebration realizes a distinctly African heterotopia of perfection.