Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-mlc7c Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-09T07:52:33.513Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

“After the End Times”: Postcrisis African Science Fiction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 February 2014

Matthew Omelsky
Matthew Omelsky*
Affiliation:
Duke University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

We live in a moment of “apocalyptic time,” the “time of the end of time.” Ours is a moment of global ecological crisis, of the ever-impending collapse of capital. That we live on the brink is too clear. What is not, however, is our ability to imagine the moment after this dual crisis. In recent years, African artists have begun to articulate this “moment after,” ushering in a new paradigm in African literature and film that speculates upon postcrisis African futures. Writers and filmmakers such as Nigeria’s Efe Okogu and Kenya’s Wanuri Kahiu have imagined future African topographies—spaces that have felt the fullest effects of climate change, nuclear radiation, and the imbalances of global capitalism. Biopolitics, sovereignty, and the human have all been reconfigured in these African science fictions. Okogu and Kahiu’s futurist aesthetics are specters that loom over our present, calling for a radically reimagined politics of the now.

Keywords

African literature and filmAfrican science fictionAfrican futuresCyborgsAnthropocene studiesEcocriticism
Type
Articles
Information
Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry , Volume 1 , Issue 1: Special Issue: New Topographies of the Postcolonial , March 2014 , pp. 33 - 49
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press, 2014 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Zizek, Slavoj, “Living in the End Times.” Polygraph 22 (2010): 261Google Scholar. An earlier draft of this essay appeared under the title “‘After the End Times’: African Futures and Speculative Fictions” at http://sites.fhi.duke.edu/anthropocene/.

2 Bloch, Ernst, The Spirit of Utopia (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000): 200Google Scholar.

3 Berthoud, Ferdinand, “The Man Who Banished Himself,” Weird Tales 3.1 (1924)Google Scholar.

4 Hartmann, Ivor, ed. AfroSF: Science Fiction by African Writers (Johannesburg: StoryTime, 2013)Google Scholar. See also my review of the anthology in “Brittle Paper: Matthew Omelsky, ‘African Science Fiction Makes a Comeback: A Review of AfroSF,’” Brittle Paper, June 25, 2013, at http://brittlepaper.com/2013/06/african-science-fiction-comeback-review-afrosf-matt-omelsky/.

5 See Deirdre Byrne’s brief 2004 overview of South African science fiction, “Science Fiction in South Africa,” PMLA 119.3 (2004): 522–525. The following is a sampling of the small though growing body of African science fiction criticism: Andries Visagie, “Global Capitalism and a Dystopian South Africa: Trenchman by Eben Venter and Moxyland by Lauren Beukes,” Criticism, Crisis, and Contemporary Narrative, ed. Paul Crosthwaite (New York: Routledge, 2011); Stobie, C., “Dystopian Dream from South Africa: Lauren Buekes’s Moxyland and Zoo City,” African Identities 10.4 (2012): 367–380CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kilgore, De Witt Douglas, “Beyond the History We Know: Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu, Nisi Shawl, and Jarla Tangh Rethink Science Fiction Tradition,” Afro-Future Females: Black Writers Chart Science Fiction's Newest New-Wave Trajectory, ed. Marleen Barr (Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2008)Google Scholar; van Veuren, Mocke Jansen, “Tooth and Nail: Anxious Bodies in Neill Blomkamp's District 9,” Critical Arts 26.4 (2012): 570–586CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 The following are exemplary of this online and gallery space presence: Okayafrica, at www.okayafrica.com/2013/03/19/african-science-fiction-versus-western/; Africa Is a Country, at http://africasacountry.com/africa-in-science-fiction/; Afrocyberpunk, at www.afrocyberpunk.com/; Milan Design Week, at www.afrofuture.it/afrofuture/home; Arnolfini, at www.arnolfini.org.uk/whatson/superpower-africa-in-science-fiction.

7 Pumzi, DVD, directed by Wanuri Kahiu (Focus Features, 2011); Okogu, Efe, “Proposition 23,”AfroSF, ed. Ivor Hartmann (Johannesburg: StoryTime, 2013)Google Scholar.

8 Crutzen, Paul and Schwägerl, Christian, “Living in the Anthropocene: Toward a New Global Ethos,” Yale Environment 360, January 24, 2011Google Scholar, at http://e360.yale.edu/feature/living_in_the_anthropocene_toward_a_new_global_ethos/2363/. See also Will Steffen et al, “The Anthropocene: Conceptual and Historical Perspectives,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 369.1938 (2011): 842-867.

9 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35.2 (2009): 197–222CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 Heise, Ursula, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the global (New York: Oxford UP, 2008): 58–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Nixon, Rob, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2011): 1–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 Berger, James, After the End: Representations of Post-Apocalypse (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1999): xiiGoogle Scholar.

13 Okogu, “Proposition 23,” 361.

14 Ibid., 362.

15 Ibid., 365.

16 Throughout this essay I use the term cyborg as Donna Harawary most rudimentarily defines it in her “Cyborg Manifesto”: “Creatures simultaneously animal and machine, who populate worlds ambiguously natural and crafted.” See Haraway, Donna, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991): 149–181Google Scholar. Although the figure of the cyborg is pertinent to Kahiu and Okogu’s works, Haraway’s broader marxist-feminist cyborg theory is less apt. For an extended examination of African cyborgian theory, see Omelsky, Matthew, “Jean-Pierre Bekolo’s African Cyborgian Thought,” Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art 31 (2012): 6–21CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 Okogu, “Proposition 23,” 356.

18 Foucault, Michel, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76 (New York: Picador, 2003): 247–265Google Scholar.

19 Mbembe, Achille, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture 15.1 (2003): 40CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20 Okogu, “Proposition 23,” 359Google Scholar.

21 Ibid., 387.

22 Ibid., 368.

23 Ibid., 376.

24 Fanon, Frantz, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. R. Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2004): 9Google Scholar.

25 Ibid., 181.

26 Ibid., 5.

27 Ibid., 7.

28 Ibid., 77.

29 Fanon, Frantz, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. C. L. Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1967): 223–232Google Scholar.

30 Fanon, Frantz, Toward the African Revolution, trans. H. Chevalier (New York: Grove Press, 1967): 186Google Scholar.

31 Okogu, “Proposition 23,” 401.

32 Jameson, Fredric, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and other Science Fictions (New York: Verso, 2007): 286–289Google Scholar.