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“After the End Times”: Postcrisis African Science Fiction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 February 2014

Matthew Omelsky
Matthew Omelsky*
Affiliation:
Duke University
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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 

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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/.

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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.

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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.

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21 Ibid., 387.

22 Ibid., 368.

23 Ibid., 376.

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25 Ibid., 181.

26 Ibid., 5.

27 Ibid., 7.

28 Ibid., 77.

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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.