Descartes in his pith helmet: Afrofuturism and genre theory

Primorac, Ranka (2024) Descartes in his pith helmet: Afrofuturism and genre theory. In, , Jeanne-Marie Jackson and Iheka, Cajetan (eds.) Intellectual Traditions of African Literature 1960-2015. (African Literature in Transition) Cambridge. Cambridge University Press. (In Press)

Abstract

‘What does the continent of Africa possess that the rest—or a greater part—of the globe does not have already in superabundance?’ asks Wole Soyinka at the outset of a book titled simply Of Africa. One way to answer this question in literary terms is to point out that, since (at the very least) the first half of the twentieth century, African literary forms have had the capacity to transmit what Soyinka calls ‘the spirituality of a continent’ and turn it into a literary resource, in Casanova’s sense of ‘material out of which literature is made’. This is to say that social spaces imagined by African fiction are often poly-ontological. They comprise multiple orders of living beings tied to specific African cosmologies; such cosmologies are often represented via formal strategies that appropriate and modify Eurocentrically sanctioned genre protocols. This chapter is concerned with formal and genre-labelling changes driven by the contemporary novelistic formation often referred to as Afrofuturism (on which, more shortly). The chapter argues that African novels’ dexterity in articulating the spirituality of a continent has, in the twenty-first century, put pressure on the explanatory power of the well-established genre distinction between Science and Fantasy fiction, arguably to the point of exhausting it. To say this is not to imply only that the distinction, influentially articulated by the Marxist theorist Darko Suvin in the late 1970s, does not work for African literature, but also that its explanatory limits, which African novels make plain, potentially affect wider critical understandings of the novel as a contemporary global form. The chapter begins by sketching the tension between a group of iconic African novels and conventional genre labels which nevertheless remain in wide usage. It then moves to a discussion of how a specific, recently named genre— Afrofuturism—has anticipated, evoked, and mobilised a set of specific intellectual and literary resources (including the early cultural theorising by Wole Soyinka, contemporaneous with Suvin’s but institutionally and discursively separate; the later theoretical work of Harry Garuba; and the repositioning and re-consecration of Amos Tutuola’s The Palm Wine Drinkard) to articulate an insurgent set of generic claims related to African utopian world-making. The chapter culminates in an extended reading of how a string of iconic twenty-first-century novels (by Nnedi Okorafor, Tade Thompson, Sofia Samatar, Lauren Beukes, and China Mieville) intervenes into the specifics of the Suvinian position on the literary meanings of ‘science’ and ‘fantasy’. The reading highlights the intellectual implications of narrative strategies through which the novels insist on foregrounding their own epistemological vocabularies, refusing to subordinate them to either ‘magic’ or ‘science,’ and self-consciously addressing multiple reading publics. Furthermore, the novels also interrogate the unidirectional imaginations of global literary flows, which would allocate to the world’s economic peripheries a central role in receiving (rather than also always-already generating) the formal and semantic elements of transnational genre systems.

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Contributors

Author: Ranka Primorac

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