Nnedi Okorafor: Trajectories of an African Futurism

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DC Field	Value
dc.identifier	ECF_article_6924
dc.title	Nnedi Okorafor: Trajectories of an African Futurism
dc.contributor.author	Colliva Teresa
dc.publisher	Edizioni Ca’ Foscari - Digital Publishing, Fondazione Università Ca’ Foscari
dc.type	Research Article
dc.language.iso	it
dc.identifier.uri	http://edizionicafoscari.it/en/edizioni4/riviste/il-tolomeo/2021/1/nnedi-okorafor-traiettorie-di-un-futurismo-african/
dc.description.abstract	This article presents an analysis of the new category of Africanfuturism coined by the Nigerian American writer (or Naijamerican, as she defines herself) Nnedi Okorafor in 2019, after years of questions about the limits that the category of Afrofuturism has put over the receptions of her works. Okorafor felt the urgency to open this new horizon to better insist on the importance of stories and narratives profoundly rooted in the African continent, thus abandoning the Western models and canons of science fiction and creating new ways of looking towards the far future. Through the analysis of Okorafor’s novels (Who Fears Death?, Lagoon and Binti), interviews and posts on her blog, the article explores the potentialities of Okorafor’s speculative fiction to deal with technologies, traditions, cultures, social transformations, and how these issues inform a future Africa that could possibly be an entirely new world, in which the concept of ‘West’ and ‘colonialism’ do not have any meaning.
dc.relation.ispartof	Il Tolomeo
dc.relation.ispartof	Vol. 23 \| December 2021
dc.issued	2021-12-20
dc.dateAccepted	2021-10-29
dc.dateSubmitted	2021-08-03
dc.identifier.issn
dc.identifier.eissn	2499-5975
dc.rights	Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License
dc.rights.uri	http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
dc.identifier.doi	10.30687/Tol/2499-5975/2021/23/022
dc.peer-review	yes
dc.subject	Africanfuturism
dc.subject	Africanfuturism
dc.subject	Nnedi Okorafor
dc.subject	Nnedi Okorafor
dc.subject	Postcolonial science fiction
dc.subject	Postcolonial science fiction
dc.subject	Speculative fiction
dc.subject	Speculative fiction
dc.subject	Visions of the future
dc.subject	Visions of the future

Research Article
open access peer reviewed

Teresa Colliva Alma Mater Studiorum Università di Bologna, Italia

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abstract

This article presents an analysis of the new category of Africanfuturism coined by the Nigerian American writer (or Naijamerican, as she defines herself) Nnedi Okorafor in 2019, after years of questions about the limits that the category of Afrofuturism has put over the receptions of her works. Okorafor felt the urgency to open this new horizon to better insist on the importance of stories and narratives profoundly rooted in the African continent, thus abandoning the Western models and canons of science fiction and creating new ways of looking towards the far future. Through the analysis of Okorafor’s novels (Who Fears Death?, Lagoon and Binti), interviews and posts on her blog, the article explores the potentialities of Okorafor’s speculative fiction to deal with technologies, traditions, cultures, social transformations, and how these issues inform a future Africa that could possibly be an entirely new world, in which the concept of ‘West’ and ‘colonialism’ do not have any meaning.

Published

Dec. 20, 2021

Accepted

Oct. 29, 2021

Submitted

Aug. 3, 2021

Language

Keywords: Nnedi Okorafor • Visions of the future • Speculative fiction • Postcolonial science fiction • Africanfuturism

permalink http://doi.org/10.30687/Tol/2499-5975/2021/23/022

Copyright: © 2021 Teresa Colliva. This is an open-access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction is permitted, provided that the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. The license allows for commercial use. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

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