Description
Contrary to stereotypes of “African culture” as homophobic, many examples of African climate fiction feature queer, cyborg, heroes and heroines who challenge dominant models of eco-activism. This paper discusses the portrayal of radical feminist, queer and cyborg characters in stories like It Doesn’t Have to be This Way (Mackay, 2022), Noor (Okorafor, 2021), Spider the Artist (Okorafor, 2011), and Mara and Dann (Lessing, 1999, 2006). These transgressive characters are some of the most powerful contributions of Africanfuturist climate fiction, but they also raise broader questions about the role of fiction in climate politics. In particular, I focus on the dynamics of White anxiety and Black utopianism, and debates about role of novels in perpetuating liberal individualism. First, how do these stories reproduce and challenge Whiteness in climate politics? Do they represent an anxious, fragile, pessimistic, White liberalism (Mitchell and Chaudhury, 2020)? Second, to what degree to they contribute to Black utopian re-imaginings of ‘the meaning and significance of being (human)’ (Jackson, 2020: 1)? Third, do such stories over-individualise narratives of political agency? As Ghosh (2016: 127) has suggested, ‘[j]ust as novels have come to be seen as narratives of identity, so too has politics become, for many, a search for personal authenticity, a journey of self-discovery’, and he argues that Anthropocene politics demand much more imaginative posthuman renderings of agency. Following Wynter in asking ‘[h]ow do we be, in Fanonian terms, hybridly human?’ (Wynter and McKittrick, 2015: 45), in this paper I explore the degree to which these stories offer fantastic, futuristic ways of being Otherwise.
