Introduction: African Science Fiction

Adejunmobi, Moradewun

doi:10.1017/pli.2016.28

Cited by 39 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 16 publications

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“…There is a rich tradition of studying science fiction novels in critical theory (Haraway 2016;Jameson 2007;Langer 2011;Whyte 2018;Yusoff and Gabrys 2011). On the one hand, there is extensive research on how science fiction texts can reflect and reinforce dominant, imperial discourses and power relations, particularly in terms of voyages of discovery and conquest, and colonial/imperial encounters with the Other (Adejunmobi 2016;Burnett 2015:134;Eatough 2017:242;Langer 2011:3;O'Connell 2016:303;Weldes 2001). On the other hand, science fiction can also play a more critical function of de-familiarising the present and reminding readers that alternative social, economic, and political worlds are possible (Weldes 2001:667).…”

Section: Puts Itmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Yet, as postcolonial theorists and literary scholars have been pointing out for some time, there are rich if often overlooked archives of African authors, settings, and characters with particularly African perspectives on climate politics (Adejunmobi 2016;Burnett 2015;Mackey 2018;Omelsky 2014;Samatar 2017). Incorporating these imaginaries into the field of cli-fi can make an important contribution to spatialising and politicising climate change.…”

Section: Africanfuturist Climate Fictionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Incorporating these imaginaries into the field of cli-fi can make an important contribution to spatialising and politicising climate change. Of course, within the field of African socio-climate imaginaries there is considerable diversity, reflecting a continent of more than a billion people, thousands of languages, and vast social, political, cultural, and literary differences (see Adejunmobi 2016;Eatough 2017;Omelsky 2014;Samatar 2017;Womack 2013). This article cannot do justice to this breadth and diversity.…”

Section: Africanfuturist Climate Fictionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Africanfuturist Socio‐Climatic Imaginaries and Nnedi Okorafor’s Wild Necropolitics

Death

2021

Antipode

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Dominant and insurgent socio-climatic imaginaries struggle for influence over how the future is envisioned. Africanfuturist imaginaries have huge potential to unsettle racialised and gendered climate narratives. In this article I use Nnedi Okorafor's novel Who Fears Death in order to challenge mainstream climate imaginaries and to imagine new forms of being and becoming in the context of climate change. Drawing on Achille Mbembe's concepts of biopolitics and necropolitics, as well as black feminist traditions of imagining new genres of the human, I argue that Okorafor's "wild necropolitics" illuminates how the forces of "wild nature" have become central features of the deployment of the means of destroying life, especially in the context of climate change. By examining the motifs of change, violence, wilderness and narration, I argue that reading and writing different stories about alternative climate futures is essential to the process of finding new ways of being and becoming human.

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Section: Puts Itmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Africanfuturist Climate Fictionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Africanfuturist Climate Fictionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Africanfuturist Socio‐Climatic Imaginaries and Nnedi Okorafor’s Wild Necropolitics

Death

2021

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“…Nuanced, complex, and sometimes contradictory pathways are critical to properly envisioning a future -particularly in parts of the world that are often sloppily-depicted as a single story and in a negative light (Adejunmobi 2016). Science fiction has contested ideas of a globalized, western idea of the future (Csicsery-Ronay 2012).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Creating a climate changed future with the sea level rise interactive- fiction game ‘Lagos2199’

Keys¹,

Keys²

2022

Preprint

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Story-based futures serve an important role in climate change scenario development. Stories are particularly useful in exploring sea level rise possibilities, since we know many coastal areas are specifically vulnerable to accelerating rises in sea level. This discrete change in coastline is different from most other climate change impacts, and offers a clear basis for scientifically-informed, future scenarios. We demonstrate this with a creative world-building effort set in Lagos, Nigeria, in the year 2199. Further, we employ story-based scenario development, and create a learning-oriented, web-based game that allows users to experience stories in an open-ended, text-based adventure style. This collaborative process blended scientific research, story-telling, and artistic co-creation to iteratively construct the game ‘Lagos2199’. The first use-case of Lagos2199 is documented herein, with corresponding survey results from the student users. This work has three core conclusions. First, the unique reality that sea level rise will literally re-draw maps can be leveraged as an entry-point for world-building and scenario development of the future. Second, such a scenario can be blended with storytelling, art, and music to create a multi-dimensional, immersive exploration of ecological and social change. Third, this kind of game experience can serve an important pedagogical role in climate change education. Providing the next generation of citizens with fluency in both climate change impacts and how society will interact with such impacts, is critical for providing adaptive capacity over the coming decades and centuries of accelerating global change.

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“…14 It has also become a topic of increasing critical interest, as attested to by two special issues of this journal on African science fiction (2016) and African genre (2017). 15 Although Jackson herself briefly aligns genre fiction with the global placement of African literature, a statement warranted by the prominence of writers such as Nnedi Okorafor and Lauren Beukes, as well as Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ's and Chris Abani's experiments with crime fiction, genre fiction in fact cuts across the "global" and "local" registers of contemporary African writing. 16 It is not just that both "global" and "local" writers might draw on the conventions of and indeed produce works of genre fiction, but that genres such as crime fiction lend themselves particularly well to exploring the global dimensions of local problems.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

The African Novel at the Vanguard

Armillas-Tiseyra

2022

Postcolon. Lit. inq

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Introduction: African Science Fiction

Cited by 39 publications

References 16 publications

Africanfuturist Socio‐Climatic Imaginaries and Nnedi Okorafor’s Wild Necropolitics

Africanfuturist Socio‐Climatic Imaginaries and Nnedi Okorafor’s Wild Necropolitics

Creating a climate changed future with the sea level rise interactive- fiction game ‘Lagos2199’

The African Novel at the Vanguard

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