Africanfuturism
| Tropes and genres | |
|---|---|
| Related tropes/genres | science fiction, fantasy, speculative fiction, magic realism, music, art, colonialism, postcolonialism, history, feminism, Afrofuturism |
| See also | African Speculative Fiction Society |
| Related articles on Fanlore. | |
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Africanfuturism is a genre of science-fiction, speculative fiction, magic realism, and related forms of literary and creative arts. It is frequently interpreted as extending an African perspective on the future based upon past or present conditions: history, slavery, colonialism, feminism, African diasporas, etc.
It is a reinterpretation of Afrofuturism because it concentrates more upon a global and authentically African range of perspectives and avoids a focus on American diaspora interpretations or inspirations.
Scholar Jane Bryce posits:
Kodwo Eshun, in a seminal essay, [argues] that, while the “practice of countermemory as... an ethical commitment to history, the dead and the forgotten” has traditionally relegated futurism to the sidelines of black creativity, this has been progressively challenged by “contemporary African artists... [for whom] understanding and intervening in the production and distribution of this dimension constitutes a chronopolitical act”... The paper proposes that this chronopolitical act (what in literature we now call speculative fiction) has its roots in African modes of storytelling that draw on myth, orality, and indigenous belief systems that lend themselves to the invention of personal mythologies, the rewriting of history in the light of future realities, and the use of extra-realist or magical phenomena as part of the everyday. Since these elements characterize many novels not thought of as speculative, this suggests that futurism has been a strain in African writing from its inception. (p. 1)[1][note 1]
Timeline
Afrofuturism is generally interpreted as having been initiated by Mark Dery in "Black to the Future"(1994) which popularised the term and the concept:
“The notion of Afrofuturism gives rise to a troubling antinomy: can a community whose past has been deliberately rubbed out, and whose energies have subsequently been consumed by the search for legible traces of its history, imagine possible futures? - Mark Dery, 1994, p. 180.[2]
Afrofuturism is seen as having some antecedent roots in earlier African American culture and science fiction.
Africanfuturism, by contrast, was proposed in 2019 by Nnedimma Nkemdili Okorafor as a more authentic and global African perspective:
Africanfuturism is similar to “afrofuturism” in the way that blacks on the continent and in the Black Diaspora are all connected by blood, spirit, history and future. The difference is that africanfuturism is specifically and more directly rooted in African culture, history, mythology and point-of-view as it then branches into the Black Diaspora, and it does not privilege or center the West.[3]
By implication, this has antecedents across African times and cultures that predate and are more inclusive than US diaspora viewpoints.
See Also
- “Write your story, and don’t be afraid to write it” — a sci-fi writer talks about finding her voice and being a superhero, 17 October 2018.
- Africanfuturism : Disrupting Science Fiction - Nnedi Okorafor with Yvonne Mbanefo - Igbo Conference, 18 June 2020 (YouTube).
- Hope Wabuke, Afrofuturism, Africanfuturism, and the Language of Black Speculative Literature, Los Angeles Review of Books, 28 August 2020.
- Edafe Onerhime, Black, Gifted, and Represented — Africanfuturism & Afrofuturism, Medium, 17 June 2021.
Notes
- ^ Bryce does refer to Afrofuturism and the Afrodiasporic movement when referencing Kodwo Eshun's study, but does not otherwise refer to either Afrofuturism or Africanfuturism in her historical study of African speculative fiction; her references to generic African cultural influences, and to Nnedi Okorafor, would therefore appear to firmly place this study philosophically within the "Africanfuturism" camp.
References
- ^ Jane Bryce, African Futurism: Speculative Fictions and “Rewriting the Great Book”, Research in African Literatures, Vol. 50, No. 1 (Spring 2019), pp. 1-19. (JSTOR)
- ^ Mark Dery, 1994. “Black to the Future”, in Flame Wars, Durham & London: Duke University Press, pp. 179-222.
- ^ Nnedimma Okorafor, Africanfuturism Defined, Nnedi's Wahala Zone Blog, 20 October 2019.