Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the peculiar politics and aesthetics of the corpus of science fictional and speculative literary work aptly characterized as “Africanfuturism” by the “Naijamerican” novelist Nnedi Okorafor, specifically in terms of how it contests the Euro-Western Science Fiction (SF) archive.

Paper long abstract:

In Eshun’s “Further Considerations on Afrofuturism”, he highlights Afrofuturism’s important work of assembling countermemories that contest the colonial archive by re-centering “Africa and its subjects into history denied by Hegel et al.” This paper examines the peculiar politics and aesthetics of the corpus of science fictional and speculative literary work aptly characterized as “Africanfuturism” by the “Naijamerican” novelist Nnedi Okorafor. Situated within global discourses on Science Fiction (SF) and its attendant privileging and preoccupation with a Euro-Western historiography, Africanfuturism emerges as a genre that contests this Euro-Western historicizing by focusing instead on African epistemologies, history and culture. It subverts the old logics of SF historicizing by foregrounding the African space and exploring tropes of contemporary SF culture such as alien encounters, technologically altered human bodies, and figurations of Artificial Intelligence.

Specifically, this paper explores the genre of Africanfuturism in terms of how it questions, complicates, modifies and transcends the Euro-Western SF imaginary. By considering Bodomo’s short film “Afronauts”, Wanuri Kahiu’s “Pumzi” and Okorafor’s “Lagoon”, the paper explores the Africanfuturist genre as always already situated in the chronopolitical act of centering the African socio-cultural space while subverting and reconstituting a Euro-Western SF archive that occludes Africa and its subjects.

In the final analysis, the paper argues that Africanfuturist texts in their narrativizing of the African socio-cultural space via SF, are invested in the important work of authoring Africa on its own terms. By fabricating “new” worlds and contemplating a technocultural Africa, the genre rejects Euro-Western artistic hegemonies that misrepresent the continent.