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In the following article, I explore several types of dislocations (environmental, war, patriarchal, to name but a few) in Tochi Onyebuchi’s novel War Girls (2019), analysed from the methodological perspective of Africanfuturism. The aim of the article is to show how the second wave of African future-oriented literature (diasporic in this case) looks back to the past (the Nigerian Civil War) in order to seek solutions for the ongoing current problems, such as the devastation of the natural environment, climate change, the participation of underage soldiers in military conflicts, and new forms of capitalism and neolonialisation. The novel is read via historical, sociological, and frequently anthropological sources to demonstrate how the speculative discourse can be firmly grounded in the scientific context. Additionally, I propose a feminist and utopian reading of War Girls. The text is divided into parts where key elements of Africanfuturism—such as digitalisation, nanotechnologies, Information Technology, African cosmologies, and oral tradition—are discussed in detail and are shown as existing at the same time, entangled with the past and future simultaneously, within human and more-than-human worlds.  Dans l’article suivant, j’explore plusieurs types de déplacements (environnementaux, liés à la guerre, patriarcaux, pour n’en citer que quelques-uns) dans le roman War Girls (2019) de Tochi Onyebuchi, analysés dans une perspective méthodologique afrofuturiste. L’objectif de cet article est de montrer comment la deuxième vague de littérature africaine tournée vers l’avenir (diasporique dans ce cas) se tourne vers le passé (la guerre civile nigériane) afin de trouver des solutions aux problèmes actuels, tels que la dégradation de l’environnement naturel, le changement climatique, la participation de soldats mineurs à des conflits militaires et les nouvelles formes de capitalisme et de néocolonialisme. Le roman est analysé à travers des sources historiques, sociologiques et souvent anthropologiques afin de démontrer comment le discours spéculatif peut être solidement ancré dans le contexte scientifique. De plus, je propose une lecture féministe et utopique de War Girls. Le texte est divisé en plusieurs parties où les éléments clés de l’afrofuturisme, tels que la numérisation, les nanotechnologies, les technologies de l’information, les cosmologies africaines et la tradition orale, sont discutés en détail et présentés comme coexistant, mêlés à la fois au passé et au futur, dans les mondes humains et plus qu’humains.

In the following article, I explore several types of dislocations (environmental, war, patriarchal, to name but a few) in Tochi Onyebuchi’s novel War Girls (2019), analysed from the methodological perspective of Africanfuturism. The aim of the article is to show how the second wave of African future-oriented literature (diasporic in this case) looks back to the past (the Nigerian Civil War) in order to seek solutions for the ongoing current problems, such as the devastation of the natural environment, climate change, the participation of underage soldiers in military conflicts, and new forms of capitalism and neolonialisation. The novel is read via historical, sociological, and frequently anthropological sources to demonstrate how the speculative discourse can be firmly grounded in the scientific context. Additionally, I propose a feminist and utopian reading of War Girls. The text is divided into parts where key elements of Africanfuturism—such as digitalisation, nanotechnologies, Information Technology, African cosmologies, and oral tradition—are discussed in detail and are shown as existing at the same time, entangled with the past and future simultaneously, within human and more-than-human worlds. 

How can we use the past to help us solve today’s urgent climate change concerns? Archaeology provides one way forward by providing a long-term view of what worked and what did not work in the past. Indigenous knowledge systems have long curated a range of survival strategies that provide powerful inspiration for thinking differently about sustainability. Inspired by Africanfuturism—or how writers of African descent have creatively reimagined Black futures—we explore how creative writing can mobilize the past to rethink climate change responses. We have designed this piece for use in middle and secondary school science, history, or literature classes. An introductory explanation and “what we know” sections provide teachers with the necessary framing and background knowledge. The two short stories could be assigned to 13–18-year-old students to illustrate the kind of reimagining they might pursue based on archaeological and oral historical information.

This paper focuses on the process of being and becoming as represented in the novels Under the Udala Trees and Binti (series). It draws from Igbo and Kemetan notions of self, identity, becoming, and destiny (chi na eke, khepert) to center the protagonists’ self-determination considering their oppressive environments. The protagonists, Ijeoma and Binti respectively, contend with who they are and are becoming alongside their neocolonial family and community expectations of its daughters. As a result, they are driven into isolation to determine self on their own terms. This paper argues that while they moved in solitude, this process is ultimately beneficial to their families and communities, offering decolonized methods of healing, and of moving towards one’s purpose. Drawing from pre-colonial Igbo cultures and traditions—as the authors are Igbo—the paper positions Under the Udala Trees and Binti as pieces that offer contemporary solutions to the global erasure or suppression of African and Black cultures and ways of existing.

Wole Soyinka’s seminal essay, “The Fourth Stage: Through the Mysteries of Ogun to the Origin of Yoruba Tragedy” which appears as appendix in his collection of critical essays, Myth, Literature and the African World (1976), has been read and critiqued as an important work of myth, mythopoesis, tragedy and the Yoruba pantheon. To date, no meta-critical study has yet treated the essay as essentially speculative fiction, or as an invented model or construct for variegated possible future applications, or even as an authentic African futuristic artistic invention. This is important in present times as a resurgence of earlier genres and trends populate the literary world, thereby raising the need for underpinnings, connections, projections, and conflations such as this article presents. With the application of archetypal author-, text-, and context-oriented theoretical modes alongside historicity, this essay navigates and re-interrogates “The Fourth Stage” and its numerous critiques in the contexts of Afrofuturism and Africanfuturism, finding it a practical model for African futuristic mytho-cultural and literary productions. I also through this essay expose the multiple areas of possible applications of such inventiveness in the reappraisal and re-interrogation of the problematics and maladies of the postcolony.

Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti unsettles harmful depictions of Black childhood and reconceptualizes the role of young Black females in racialized communities with an acute awareness of the challenges they encounter in the realworld. Using the speculative form of Binti as an allegory for the present, this article turns to the character of Binti to highlight ways to overcome obstacles of exclusion and otherness. Inspiration is found in how Okorafor utilizes Africanfuturism as a framework that artfully integrates and retains African Indigenous cultures in a technologically advanced world. Additionally, childhood studies informs how this article examines the impact of Africanfuturism as a defamiliarizing strategy to address normalized (Western, white) childhood and notions of futurity for Black children and youth.

LaGuardia (2018-2019) is an Africanfuturist comic series depicting a world where aliens coexist with humans. It follows Future Nwafor Chukwuebuka, an African American woman fleeing Nigeria while smuggling an alien plant to the US. Amid an impending alien war, Future navigates motherhood and her hybrid human-alien identity. Using posthumanism, this paper examines Nnedi Okorafor's vision of an egalitarian future where aliens, animals, and machines challenge anthropocentric ideologies. The Africanfuturist narrative expands black subjectivities beyond normative human modes, integrating nonhuman entities into a multifaceted techno-future. Through this lens, the story reimagines belonging, identity, and coexistence beyond rigid human exceptionalism.