This essay examines the recent rise in popularity of science fiction in Africa. I argue that this growth can be traced to key shifts within the logic of structural adjustment programs. Over the last twenty years, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have begun to place a heightened emphasis on “poverty reduction strategies” (or PRSs). These PRSs have taken the two organizations’ longstanding commitment to free-market policies and adapted them to the rhetoric of social and economic justice by suggesting that “sustainable” welfare programs can only be constructed through the “long-term” benefits of well-planned “institutions.”As I show, this vision of long-term development has encouraged a move toward fictional forms capable of speaking to elongated temporal scales. Using Nnedi Okorafor’s novelLagoonas my primary example, I investigate how sci-fi narratives have struggled to represent social agency within thelongue duréeof institutional planning.

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This essay is the first of a two-part series on the use of world-systems theory in literary studies. It argues that the recent popularity of world-systems theory among literary scholars has raised important questions about how we practice literary history. Appeals to a more "global" configuration of world literary space seem to promise a more inclusive literary history, but world-systems theory's expansive focus also clashes with literary studies' traditional definitions of cultural activity. In order to investigate this tension, the essay begins by examining the birth of world-systems theory. It shows how world-systems theory grew out of a number of intersecting currents in academic scholarship, including Marxist economics, dependista theory, and Annales historiography. The essay then proceeds to trace literary studies' earliest engagements with world-systems theory. As I show, these initial engagements took place within two distinct critical traditions: (1) in the Subaltern Studies project, which diagnosed intellectual production as an effect of the global division of labor; and (2) in Jamesonian Marxism, which attempted to map literature onto the world-system under the aegis of a leftist Hegelianism. The essay concludes by analyzing how these projects have helped to redefine the nature of the relationship between literary production and economic systems.In their introduction to the volume Immanuel Wallerstein and the Problem of the World, David Palumbo-Lui, Bruce Robbins, and Nirvana Tanoukhi sum up the ambivalence literary critics have felt toward world-systems theory. On the one hand, the concept of a world-system would seem, in their words, to "satisfy our own most fervent inclinations … for greater inclusiveness and conceptual reform" (4). This inclination was a prime motivation behind world-systems theory's earliest articulations, which sought to answer a deceptively simple question: why, when postcolonial nations were modernizing their economic institutions and infrastructure at a breakneck pace, did they seem to be continually falling further and further behind Western nations? For such noted historians as Immanuel Janet Abu-Lughod, the only way to explain this continued disparity was to shift one's attention away from these nations themselves and onto the structure of the world economy. By taking the world economy as a single "unit" of analysis, these scholars argued, one could see how inequality was produced within the very trade networks connecting Western and postcolonial states together -inequalities that remained invisible when looking at the nation alone (Wallerstein 1974, 15). For those literary critics who have adopted a world-systems perspective, the goal has been much the same: to show how a more abstract, structuralist model of world literary space might be able to uncover hitherto unnoticed inequalities within the production and reception of culture. Indeed, if Euro-American criticism has long excluded a majority of the world's creative products under the questionable rubric of "great [read...

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