Paper short abstract:

This paper looks at recent African short fiction and their engagement with environmental disruption. The paper explores the entanglements of colonial extraction, resource exploitation, and ecological collapse in four short stories and their imaginings of futures after the end of the (human) world.

Paper long abstract:

The call for the African Short Story Day collection with the theme Disruption was closed before the world (and the publication of the anthology) came to a halt due to the outbreak of a deadly zoonotic virus. In this uncanny premonition of a disruptive future and soon-to-be-present, the selected African writers provide visionary contributions to the field of short fiction, environmental literature, and speculative fiction. This paper looks at four short stories published in this anthology in 2021. The four short stories engage with environmental disruption and explore futures born out of contemporary ecological degradation, colonial extraction, and racial capitalism. Nadia Ahidjo’s “Before the Rains Came,” “Static” by Alithnayn Abdulkareem, “Laatlammer” by Julia Louw, and “Before We Die Unwritten” by Innocent Ilo deal in distinct ways with gross environmental destruction, unabating resource exploitation, and total climate collapse and gauge what remains of the present in their imaginings of futures after the end of the (human) world. These short stories express rigorous urgency and agency in navigating over-abundance and scarcity, means of (non-)survival, and new and old social orders in the aftermath of environmental disaster. Moreover, by merging pressing ecological concerns with Afrofuturist elements, these short stories contemplate what was, what is, and what may be from a postcolonial Afrocentric point of view and offer new symbioses between literature and environmental consciousness. By exploring the prescient entanglements of climate crisis, ecological collapse, and Afrofuturism in contemporary African short fiction, this paper aims at contributing to the growing research on African ecocriticism.