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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.