By Jenna N. Hanchey and Godfried Asante AbstractIn this essay, we examine the figure of Oyin Da in Tade Thompson’s The Wormwood Trilogy to demonstrate how Africanfuturism uses colonial infrastructure—or “the master’s house”—in queer ways to resist neocolonialism and produce decolonial contexts of queer and feminist African life. Drawing on Audre Lorde’s often cited quote,…
Category: Feminist Africa: Vol.2 Issue 2 – Gender and Sexuality in African Futurism
When the Lagoons Remember: An Afroqueer Futurist Reading of “Blue Ecologies of Agitation”
By Kwame Edwin Otu AbstractIn this essay, I conduct an afroqueer futurist reading of e-waste ecologies in postcolonial Ghana. I bring ethnographic observations undertaken at the Agbogbloshie e-waste dump, arguably the world’s largest e-waste dump, inconversation with Nnedi Okorafor’s feminist and Africanfuturist novel, Lagoon, which focuses on the environmental consequences of petrochemical capitalism in Nigeria….
“One Foot on the Other Side”: An Africanfuturist Reading of Irenosen Okojie’s Butterfly Fish (2015) and Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater (2018)
By Kelsey Ann McFaul AbstractThis essay argues that Africanfuturism is present in a much wider range of African literature than just those texts with science-fictional or speculative themes. Rather, Africanfuturism is a method of storytelling and of literary criticism that centres African ways of being and thinking and, against inherited traditions that render them science-fictional,…
Haunted Airports and Sexual Anxieties in Nana Nyarko Boateng’s “Swallowing Ice”
by Delali Kumavie AbstractThis essay argues that the airport is an international borderland where the nation attempts to position itself within the futural orientation of transit while also making gestures to cement its sovereignty. Drawing on Ghanaian writer Nana Nyarko Boateng’s short story, “Swallowing Ice”, which tells the story of two women Frenchkissing at the…
Africanfuturism and the Reframing of Gender in the Fiction of Nnedi Okorafor
By Arit Oku AbstractMarvel’s Black Panther movie, released in 2018, sparked renewed interest in the genre of science fiction (SF), particularly in Afrofuturism and Africanfuturism (AF) as SF subgenres that promote Black and African themes and heritage. This study delineates the similarities and differences between Afrofuturism and AF using two writings by Nnedi Okorafor to…
Gender and Sexuality in African Futurism
By Jacqueline-Bethel Tchouta Mougoué This Feminist Africa issue was inspired by my weekly conversations with five African-born graduate students in “Gender & Sexuality in Afro-Futurism”, an upper-level course offered by the Department of African Cultural Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the United States. We began the course by discussing why individuals of African…
Feminist Africa, Volume 2, Issue 2 (2021): Gender and Sexuality in African Futurism
This Feminist Africa issue was inspired by my weekly conversations with five African-born graduate students in “Gender & Sexuality in Afro-Futurism”, an upper-level course offered by the Department of African Cultural Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the United States. We began the course by discussing why individuals of African descent have been marginalised…
Fashioning Postfeminism: Spectacular Femininity and Transnational Culture by Simidele Dosekun
By Rosemary Oyinlola Popoola Fashioning Postfeminism: Spectacular Femininity and Transnational Culture seeks to recentre and challenge dominant narratives about postfeminism from the standpoint of often silenced and marginalized women of the Global South, specifically socio-economically privileged Nigerian women. Over many years, postfeminism has been framed as the exclusive preserve of White women and girls—with only…
Methodologies in Caribbean Research on Gender and Sexuality,by Kamala Kempadoo and Halimah A.F. DeShong(eds)
By Sylvia Tamale This compendium is a breath of fresh air for those frustrated with dominant narratives that feed into the (neo)colonial, Eurocentric and hetero-patriarchal projects. The authors engage in counter readings of conventional archives and produce knowledge from unconventional sources. What better way to decolonize knowledge production than theorizing gender and sexuality “from the…
“Liberation is Necessarily an Act of Culture”: A Review of Spirit Desire by Sokari Ekine
-by Luam Kidane In the middle of Spirit Desire, a photo book on Haitian Vodoun, you see Sokari Ekine, the photographer, for the first time. Standing in the waters of Sodo, Haiti, she is metaphysically encountering Haitian ancestors in the liminal space between Africa and Haiti, where Haiti is Africa and Africa is Haiti. In…