'The end of the world as we know it': imagining new possibilities for the Anthropocene through a study of Nigerian Africanfuturism

Young, Lisbeth

'The end of the world as we know it': imagining new possibilities for the Anthropocene through a study of Nigerian Africanfuturism

Thesis / Dissertation

2023

Abstract

The imaginary of the Anthropocene as an environmental apocalypse facing the planet and calls for ecological literature from the perspective of the Global North masks the current environmental crisis in parts of the world that are “already living the apocalypse”. Likewise, science fiction has been historically centred in the West in its interrogation of apocalyptic scenarios. This thesis examines how Africanfuturism, a term coined by Nnedi Okorafor in 2019 to define a new African-focussed science fiction, reframes the imaginaries of the Anthropocene as a global environmental apocalypse from the perspective of the Global South. This study combines an analysis of Africanfuturist science fiction tropes and narrative strategies with an ecocritical reading informed by Rob Nixon's notion of “slow violence” to re-frame the urgency of climate change within the context of postcolonial Nigeria. Reading beyond representations of the current environmental crisis through genres such as petro-fiction, I concentrate on Tade Thompson's Wormwood trilogy (2018–2019), in conversation with other contemporary Africanfuturist novels set in Nigeria, namely Nnedi Okorafor's Lagoon (2014), After the Flare (2017) by Deji Bryce Olukotun and Suyi Davies Okungbowa's David Mogo, Godhunter (2019). I argue that Africanfuturism allows for the re-imagination of the ecological crisis through depictions of the entanglement of the posthuman and nonhuman and the setting of a post-apocalyptic world providing a mechanism through which the extent of the crisis can be realised.

Keywords

English Language and Literature

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