Paper short abstract:

As Western narratives often position Africa as heading for dystopia, breaking from linear understandings of time opens hope for African futures. This presentation examines how Africanfuturist speculative fiction engages with non-linear time in ways that challenge Western developmental logics.

Paper long abstract:

Time is not a universal constant. While even Western science recognizes the contingency and relationality of time, linear temporalities dominate scholarly understandings, and, importantly, underlie logics of development. As “history…splits humans from non-humans across the axis of developmental time” (Ibrahim, 2021, p. 16), challenging developmental notions of linear time allows for placing hope toward African liberation. This presentation thus examines the way that Africanfuturist speculative fiction writers engage with non-linear understandings of time in ways that challenge Western developmental logics. Looking to Shingai Njeri Kagunda’s & This is How to Stay Alive and Tade Thompson’s Far From the Light of Heaven, this presentation examines how non-linear representations of time in Africanfuturist fiction open potential for decolonial futures by breaking out of the Western developmental notion of Africa as the “zone of the absolute dystopia” (Eshun, 2003, p. 292). A dystopic future is not set in stone, much as the West may forecast otherwise. In the collection Black Quantum Futurism, Phillips (2015) writes “The truth is, the future, both near and far, is currently impacting upon your present, now, currently reaching back from its position to meet you and create your present experience of now” (p. 14). The imaginings of Africanfuturism reach back to the present to impact the types of futures that will be brought into being, providing avenues for radical hope.