Paper short abstract:

A number of speculative novels make use of African urban landscapes as a space of projection for future dreams and current disappointments. This paper will look at a number of novels from the continent and its diaspora and trace how time is employed as an artistic intervention into the present.

Paper long abstract:

The traumatic legacies of the Middle Passage and Colonialism both affect(ed) how certain codes are inscribed and utilized. African science fiction and speculative fiction offer different accesses to national and global futures. Lauren Beuke's Zoo City (2010) and Moxyland (2008), Keziah Jones' Captain Rugged (2014), Kodjo Laing's Major Gentil and the Achimota Wars (1992), and Abdourahman A. Waberi's In the United States of Africa (2009) produce and negotiate different possible futures. The codes employed and established speak strongly to Afro-American fictional texts such as Samuel R. Delany's Dhalgren (1975), or Ralph Ellison's Invisble Man (1952). The city becomes a space in which networks, kinships, and relationships can be re-imagined, especially in communities that are locked out of local and national formulations of futures. This locking-out takes the form of discriminatory practices such as urban segregation and redlining.

It is at this juncture that new forms of dreaming and identity-formation can take root and begin to effect change. Time is re-configured and re-negotiated, making use of resources such as the archive and artistic practices. These create a counter-balance to the official and power-reliant representational spaces that control, define, and design the urban landscape. By inserting the creative, resistant subject within this landscape, exclusionary spaces become imbued with the social. This reconfiguration is furthered through imagined cities and alternative ways of living in existing cities.