Of freedom and the problem of the future in contemporary diasporic African speculative fiction

Abstract

Reading Deji Bryce Olukotun’s After the Flare (2017) and Lesley Nneka Arimah’s “What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky” (2017) alongside Emmanuel Dongala’s “Jazz et vin de palme” (“Jazz and Palm Wine,” 1970), this essay begins with the observation that these contemporary works of speculative fiction by writers from the recent African diaspora suggest a sense of crisis about the future. Both Arimah and Olukotun proffer future worlds little different from the present, in which current conditions of exploitation and inequality are magnified. Rather than being the symptom of a creative impasse that cannot imagine a world beyond the domination of capital, however, I argue that these attenuated futures function as counter-futurisms, facilitating critical meditation on the question of freedom in the present in a manner consonant with what Dongala earlier achieved via his more comical approach. For all three writers, freedom is a project that extends beyond the limits of the nation-state and calls for a larger epistemic break along the lines of what Rinaldo Walcott has termed Black freedom—an irruptive force that rejects the linear and entails a fundamental reorganization of what it means to be human.

Keywords:

• Diaspora
• developmentalism
• science fiction
• counter-futurisms
• Afrofuturism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 As Iheka and others have pointed out, exploitation of the Niger Delta predates the discovery of petroleum reserves, pointing back to the earlier boom in palm oil in the nineteenth century and, before that, the trade in enslaved people (109, see also Wenzel).

2 The novels of Tade Thompson’s Wormwood trilogy posit an analogous scenario, in which the protagonist (Kaaro) is employed in using his psychic powers to explore the xenosphere, created following the arrival of an alien force known as “Wormwood.” Like Nneoma, Kaaro’s work as a “sensitive” puts him at risk, both within Nigeria and from Wormwood itself.

3 Matthew Beaumont traces this idea to Jameson’s The Seeds of Time (1994), where it appears in the introduction as “It seems to be easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism; perhaps that is due to some weakness in our imaginations” (xii). The idea recurs in a later essay by Jameson, “Future City” (2003), now as an unattributed quote: “Someone once said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism” (76). Per Beaumont, Jameson was likely obliquely referring to H. Bruce Franklin’s observation that J. G. Ballard, in much of his work, was “mistaking the end of capitalism for the end of the world” (103).

4 Film, including such works as Neill Blomkamp’s District 9 (2009) and Wanuri Kahiu’s Pumzi (2010), has also been an important medium for the exploration of the questions raised by the literary works I analyze in this essay. They are all, to borrow a phrase from Matthew Omelsky, “postcrisis speculations” (see Omelsky, Sides).

5 I borrow the term “substantive” here from Taoua’s typology, which comprises what she identifies as “instrumental” (including political and civil rights as well as access to resources), “substantive” (the ability to make choices and the capacity to develop one’s potential and improve quality of life through education, work, and social opportunities), and “existential” (relating to the spiritual realm, ethical values, and the psyche) freedoms (24).

6 Here, Wynter’s “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument” and Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America are key points of reference.

7 Walcott’s recent essay, “‘Inner Plantation’: Caribbean Studies, Black Studies, and a Black Theory of Freedom,” which argues for the ways in which racial formations in the United States mirror those of the Caribbean, makes a similar argument for thinking across these different iterations of diaspora. As Walcott explains, he returns to diaspora “because it offers us a way to think Black collectivity while being attentive to nation, state, and geography but at the same time to not necessarily succumb to any of them” (125). For more on the (institutional) history of the relationship between African and diaspora studies, see Brock.

8 Arimah was born in the United Kingdom, raised in Nigeria, and (as of writing) lives and works in the United States. Olukotun was raised in and currently lives and works in the United States. Both might be situated at the limits of a strictly geographical delimitation of contemporary African writing. However, as Olaniyan makes clear in “African Literature in the Post-Global Age: Provocations on Field Commonsense,” events of the last thirty years have radically transformed the material and imaginative landscapes of African writing, such that we “need expansive definitions of what constitutes ‘Africa’ and ‘literature’ today” (387). I read Arimah and Olukotun within such an expansive definition, recognizing that—like so many of their contemporaries with roots in parts of the world now understood as the Global South—Arimah and Olukotun can be understood as belonging to multiple literary traditions at once.

9 Unusual for the typical trajectories of intellectuals from Francophone Africa in his generation (that is, toward France), Dongala attended Oberlin College on a Ford Foundation fellowship in the 1960s and went on to live in Connecticut, New York, and New Jersey, before returning to Congo. His engagement with questions of civil rights, Black liberation, and the Black Arts Movement informed the stories in Jazz and Palm Wine as well as much of his later work (see Thomas).

10 For more on this understanding of genre, see Adejunmobi as well as Jaji and Saint.

11 Suvin’s description of science fiction is the elaboration of an argument made in the earlier essay “On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre,” in which Suvin describes science fiction as “the literature of cognitive estrangement.” In both cases, estrangement (or defamiliarization)—here Suvin draws from the work of Viktor Shklovsky and Bertolt Brecht—serves a critical function in altering the reader’s perspective on their present. This, Suvin posits, makes science fiction a “fundamentally subversive genre” (379).

12 I am synthesizing a wide range of work on science fiction and postcolonialism; see Rieder; Kerslake; Smith; Carstens and Roberts; Bould, “Introduction”; Langer; Hoagland and Sarwal; Hopkinson and Megan; as well as the special issue of the Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, “African Science Fiction” (3.3 [2016]).

13 Coined by Mark Dery in 1993 to describe “Speculative fiction that treats African-American themes and addresses African-American concerns in the context of twentieth century technoculture—and, more generally, African-American signification that appropriates images of technology and a prosthetically enhanced future” (180), the term Afrofuturism today has expansive and sometimes contradictory associations; for more on this see Dery; Bould, “The Ships”; Samatar. See also the Oxford English Dictionary entry for “Afrofuturism” (www.oed.com/view/Entry/37743707), which expands Dery’s emphasis on “African American” to the more generalized “black history and culture.”

14 The French original reads, “Un accident survenu à cette époque reste encore sans explication aujourd’hui: le délégué de l’Afrique du Sud devint brusquement blanc immaculé puis se volatilisa. Plusieurs hypothèses ont été avancées mais c’est autour des deux questions suivantes que semblent s’orienter les recherches: a) Était-ce l’effet du vin de palme? b) Était-il étranger à la Terre des hommes? En attendant une réponse scientifiquement irréfutable, une ligne Verwoerd (cordon sanitaire préventif) a été établie autour de ce pays. Ce cordon existe encore aujourd’hui” (125).

15 This epigraph also appears in English in the French (115).

16 Ziethen offers a similarly recuperative reading of the relationship between Dongala and Baraka’s stories. Dominic Thomas, meanwhile, argues that Dongala’s story underlines his understanding of the “symbiotic links” between the relative historical trajectories of Africans on the continent and African Americans in the diaspora (141-142).

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Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra

Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra is an Associate Professor of Comparative literature at the Pennsylvania State University. Specializing in the post-independence literatures of Africa and Latin America, and South-South comparison more broadly, she has published on a wide range of topics, including novels about dictators in Latin America and Africa, speculative fiction in African literatures, and the intersections between the contemporary novel and the comparative framework of the Global South.