Paper short abstract:

This paper deals with South African underground hip-hop and its imaginations of futurity and alternative worlds grounded in lived experiences of its haunting past of erased histories and dystopic realities.

Paper long abstract:

South Africa with its horrific past of prototypical concentration camps, the Herero genocide in neighboring Namibia (then Deutsch-Südwestafrika), and complete racial segregation during the high apartheid era all serve as one of many resources of lived experience for the process of constructing imaginaries of the future. This paper aims at tracing these speculative aspects within hip-hop’s song lyrics. Embedded in a long tradition of Hip Hop culture since the early 80’s in South Africa, particularly the underground community, such as the Iapetus Records collective, has put forth speculative imaginaries of futurity grounded in past and present experiences of alienation and oppression that allow for a contextualization of hip-hop within a broader scope of Black speculative fiction and African futurism. Kodwo Eshun’s concept of sonic fiction serves as a conceptual framework to conceive of hip-hop as creating otherworlds that break down Western conceptions of time as linear chronology and deal with temporality as a perpetual presence of the ever-now. Understood that way, this might open up a way of reading these texts as a warning of both the pending ecological disaster and dystopic tendencies of global technocracy, while inherently demonstrating a critique of the concept of the Anthropocene.