Afro-Centered Futurisms in Our Speculative Fiction, a twelve-chapter collection, proposes “Afrocentric Futurisms” as an inclusive term encompassing Africa and its diasporas without erasing their differences. Rather than privileging one label—Afrofuturism, Africanfuturism, Afrosurrealism—the collection draws on the voices of eleven author-scholars from across the African continent and diaspora, each autoethnographically grounding their own practice. The book’s central argument is a refusal of homogeneity; with over 1.4 billion people, 54 countries, and over 3,000 languages (xv), no single framework can contain Black speculative imagination. Above all, its contributors seek creative freedom unbounded by genre constraints, the liberty simply to tell their stories on their own terms.

The volume’s theoretical architecture rests on a sustained interrogation of naming and classification. Suyi Okungbowa’s opening chapter, the collection’s most substantial theoretical contribution, traces terminology from Mark Dery’s coinage of “Afrofuturism” (1994) through Nnedi Okorafor’s “Africanfuturism” (2019), building on Molefi Kete Asante’s Afrocentricity to decouple futurism from Marinetti’s nationalist project and embrace cosmological, spiritual, and nonlinear temporalities, identifying productive tensions between existing frameworks rather than dismissing or uncritically endorsing any. Eugen Bacon’s Chapter Three, on the Afro-irreal extends this refusal of taxonomic fixity; she declines to enter debates about labels yet freely applies them on her own terms, demonstrating through excerpts from Chasing Whispers and Mage of Fools what speculative African practice looks like—dreamlike sequences, Swahili-inflected language, dystopian worldbuilding connecting Tanzania’s ujamaa ideology to climate catastrophe. Nerine Dorman’s Chapter Eleven poses the question haunting the entire volume from a different angle: “What makes an African?” Prompted by a French publisher’s rejection of her novel as “not recognizably African,” Dorman, a white South African, confronts this position directly and delivers one of the collection’s most resonant critiques, of the reductive Western media image of Africa as a continent stripped of modern infrastructure and defined by wildlife.

A second major thread is the decolonization of knowledge systems through spirituality, cosmology, and language. Stephen Embleton argues in Chapter Two, on Africanfuturist worldbuilding, that African writers possess an unprecedented opportunity to construct cosmologies genuinely new to the world stage, drawing on his novel Bones & Runes and the Sauúti Collective. His critique of the missionary Crowther’s translation of the Yoruba deity Esu as “devil” exemplifies the distortions that arise when non-African actors control African frameworks. Nuzo Onoh deepens this argument in Chapter Four, by insisting that African spirituality is not a cultural artifact but an active, living force central to any credible vision of African futures, drawing on Igbo cosmological philosophy to challenge the secularist assumptions of Western speculative fiction. Cheryl Ntumy’s Chapter Six, complements Onoh’s from a different vantage, reflecting on how growing up in Ghana, where magic and mysticism are taken for granted, shaped her Chronicles of the Countless Clans series. Together, these chapters make a compelling collective case that spiritual and cosmological knowledge systems are not ornamental but structurally essential to Afrocentric speculative practice, though the collections would benefit from a wider range of engagement with the continent’s diverse spiritual traditions beyond Igbo and Ghanaian examples.

The collection’s political arguments are equally forceful. Shingai Njeri Kagunda’s Chapter Five, drawing on her novella & This Is How to Stay Alive, argues that imagining alternative temporalities is not escapism but a mode of confronting political reality, with capitalism identified as a system that forecloses alternative imaginaries. Dilman Dila extends this logic in Chapter Ten, from aesthetic resistance to institutional design, offering a vision of direct democracy modeled on precolonial Acholi governance structures and arguing that Africa’s precolonial systems contain urgently relevant models for the struggle against authoritarianism and inequality. Together, Kagunda and Dila demonstrate the volume’s range: from surrealist disruption to concrete political blueprints, speculative fiction emerges as a tool of political imagination. A productive tension remains, however, between surrealism’s aesthetic disruptions and the question of whether such disruptions alone constitute effective political resistance.

Questions of identity run throughout, and several contributors theorize identity as fundamentally fluid. Xan van Rooyen argues in Chapter Seven, from a nonbinary perspective that queerness is not a Western imposition on African fiction but a recovery of precolonial traditions that colonialism suppressed; Africanfuturism, in van Rooyen’s view, offers a path toward an African-inspired post-gender society rooted in historical authenticity. Frayverse—a universe shaped by abrasive, conflicting magics, functions as a formal enactment of this thesis. Aline-Mwezi Niyonsenga uses the figure of the “shapeshifter” in Chapter Eight, to embody unstable, composite identities that emerge when cultural boundaries are crossed, drawing on her novelette Fell Our Selves (2023). Tobi Ogundiran’s Chapter Nine on fabulism offers a related argument through craft, exploring how his Jackal, Jackal duology weaves Yoruba folktales with Western fairy tales to interrogate culture and cosmology, though the chapter occasionally treats fabulism, surrealism, and magical realism as interchangeable.

The closing chapter serves as a methodological coda that reframes everything preceding it. Eugen Bacon contextualizes the volume’s autoethnographic design, arguing that the academic demand to separate the personal from the scholarly is itself a form of epistemic exclusion used to delegitimize African knowledge. By legitimizing autoethnography as scholarly method, the chapter challenges dominant academic conventions and brings the volume to a fitting, open-ended conclusion: each contribution, ultimately, is an act of self-definition. The collection makes no attempt to resolve its own internal debates about terminology and genre, which may be a strength rather than a limitation; in a field still negotiating its own naming, the refusal of false resolution may itself be an intellectual position. Rather than advancing a single unified theory of Afrocentric speculative fiction, the volume assembles eleven practitioners in the act of defining their own work.