This essay investigates the critical function of science fiction (SF) tropes in SF and non-SF works by and about Africans. It begins with the assertion that works that invoke SF tropes, even if they are not properly speaking SF, can productively be read within the frame of SF. It then analyzes the ways in which writers and visual artists use speculative technological advances to explore the systematic marginalization of the African continent in the world-system. Drawing on Darko Suvin, Raymond Williams, and Fredric Jameson, it illustrates how these works use the cognitive estrangement characteristic of SF to posit a break in established systems of thought; this is, ultimately, a utopian gesture. Works discussed include Deji Bryce Olukotun’s Nigerians in Space, Sony Labou Tansi’s Life and a Half, Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Wizard of the Crow, Cristina de Middel’s The Afronauts, and Frances Bodomo’s Afronauts.

Nnedi Okorafor is a member of a growing vanguard of global SF/F authors who challenge the hegemony of SF as a purely Western genre. This decentering of SF foremost demands a critical engagement with its dominant, operative tropes. In this light, Lagoon subverts the stock colonial ideology long associated with the first contact alien invasion narrative. Drawing on Afrofuturist criticism, this essay argues that Lagoon utilizes the figure of the alien in order to examine Nigeria as both an object of the neoliberal futures industry and a progenitor of radical anti-neoimperial futurity. Rather than merely incorporating the predominantly Americentric determinations of much Afrofuturist thought wholesale, however, the novel demands a rethinking of the role of the alien from an African-utopian perspective. Ultimately, this requires a reconsideration of the work of the SF novum itself in line with Alain Badiou’s conception of the event, whereby the introduction of the SF novum of the alien can be seen as a placeholder for the unknowable, unforeseeable eruption of a radical, historical event: the reawakening of a seemingly structurally unrepresentable anticolonial subjectivity that is pitched against the ideological confines of the neoliberal present.

Both Derek Wright and Francis Ngaboh-Smart have interpreted Laing’s Major Gentl and the Achimota Wars (1992) as an allegory for the emergence of the Internet. In that novel, a future Africa has been digitally erased from the Web archive, and the story follows a civil war aimed at reintegrating the continent into the global scene. Beginning from this reading, I approach Laing’s next work, Big Bishop Roko and the Altar Gangsters (2006), as a formal sequel to Major Gentl, investigating the changing landscape of global digital access and its potential as a site of resistance over the decade that separates their publication. If, in Major Gentl, West Africans have been exiled from the Web, the eponymous protagonist in Roko uses networked access to interrupt neoliberal economic and social engineering underway in the global North. Through experiments in “genetic mutation”—a metaphor for cyborgian transformation from biological to networked existence—Roko hacks the evolutionary process and forces Africa’s voice into the digital sphere in an attempt to remedy that technology’s unequal distribution. In both novels, Laing indigenizes science fiction using a technique I refer to as jujutech—a hybrid of science fiction and African folk traditions. The resulting style identifies the ways the genre itself mutates and evolves as it escapes the gravity of its Euro-American roots. Laing’s decision to publish Roko electronically further points to form following function, highlighting new avenues for the dissemination of experimental African works in underrepresented genres.

Given the centrality of utopia to the African literary and postcolonial imaginary, science fiction by African writers offers a unique opportunity to explore and critique the sociopolitical salience of imagined African futures. Through a close reading of three short stories in the AfroSF: Science Fiction by African Writers Vol I (2012) anthology, I illustrate how generic science fiction utopias prove to be much too sterile when applied to an African context and thus do not amount to a viable and sustainable future. Making use of tropes of contagion, there is a clear desire to demonstrate that the human impulse is, in many ways, contrary to the objectives of neat utopias and these stories subsequently seek to “contaminate” the notion of utopia itself. Overall, I suggest that this is indicative of a shifting postcolonial landscape that needs to more carefully weigh the price of its utopias.

This essay probes the relationship between nature and infrastructure in Moxyland (2008) and Zoo City (2010), SF novels by the South African writer Lauren Beukes. I show, in one vein, how “nature” and “infrastructure” are not at all opposed in the way that ecocriticism and urban studies often suggest; in these speculative fictions, nature and infrastructure coincide, such that “nature” becomes coextensive with everyday life in these texts. At the same time, the essay uses Moxyland and Zoo City to explore a problem I take to be fundamental to literary and environmental studies in Africa, namely the place of African texts and contexts in the rapidly growing body of work on the Anthropocene, humanity’s new geologic age. Not only do these novels suggest yoking discourse on the Anthropocene to the new materialisms of scholars such as Jane Bennett or Bruno Latour, but the manner in which they do so can help us think about how to make the concept accessible to literary form.

In his Afterword to The Singapore Grip, J. G. Farrell thanks Giorgio and Ginevra Agamben for suggesting the phrase that became the title of his novel. What can we make of this surprising and unexpected connection between an Anglo-Irish author’s novel about colonial Singapore on the eve of its fall to the Japanese army during World War II and Agamben’s writings on biopolitics? Despite the serendipitous nature of the encounter between the two writers and the lack of any causal relation between their works, my paper argues that there is an unacknowledged affinity that allows us to open them up to what Agamben calls their Entwicklungsfähigkeit, “the locus and the moment wherein they are susceptible to development,” thereby bringing out the biopolitical elements in Farrell’s novel and turning Agamben’s insights into dispositifs or biopolitical apparatuses in the direction of the analysis of colonial rule.

Bharati Mukherjee’s novel Jasmine works well in the multicultural North American classroom because it can inspire playful, mutually contradictory, inherently unstable readings. The novel must not be thought of as inviting one particular reading but as permitting student readers to find the potential for play in categories of identity that implicate them deeply.

An exploration of African literary studies and what might be its most salient and informed tools of self-constitution and self-understanding in the contemporary moment. More than half a century after formal literary studies emerged in Africa, much of the field is still fixated with a deep suspicion of the true provenance of its own production. The paper theoretically distills some of the expressed or implied evaluative canons of belonging, explores their methods of application, and critically assesses their contemporary relevance—or even resonance. The goal is to arrive at what might be a most enabling conception of African letters for an age I conceive as “post-global.”