Explore the vast range of titles available.

This essay examines twenty-first-century African science fiction in the context of the history of Afrofuturism. The Pan-African vision of the Black Audio Film Collective, a British group active in the 1980s and 1990s, provides a framework for analyzing contemporary works by artists including Nnedi Okorafor, Tendai Huchu, Wanuri Kahiu, and Wangechi Mutu. The essay argues for the inclusion of African artists in the discourse on Afrofuturism and identifies points of convergence between African and African diasporic futurisms that require, and will reward, further research, such as posthumanism, time travel as resistance, and the philosophy of the remix.

In the poem \"ca'line's prayer\" Lucille Clifton marks the progression of Black generational memory through the metaphor of drought. The poem's 1969 publication coincided with one of the worst droughts in modern history. Across the West African Sahel late rains and the onset of famine led to widespread death and displacement. Starting from this conjunctural moment in the late 1960s and using Clifton's provocation about the \"Blackness\" of drought, this article contemplates representations of arid environments in African and Afro-diasporic texts. I consider various imaginings of arid spaces, presented simultaneously as wasteland and homeland. Surveying critical scholarship on the Sahelian drought, I interrogate the contested meanings of Black life and death in deserts. I also consider the contemporary resonances of these themes, engaging African eco-critical and Afro/Africanfuturists texts. I show how these portrayals of actual and imagined deserts reveal alternate modes of encounter forged through Black/African ecological thought.

In this article, I offer a reading of Wanuri Kahiu’s short film Pumzi (2009), which depicts the aftermath of a devastating water crisis that forced human communities in East Africa underground in order to survive. Following scholars such as Ritch Calvin, Kirk Bryan Sides, or Mich Nyawalo, who have dissected the film in the context of its treatment of environmental issues and its Africanfuturist leanings, I aim to foreground the function of the body in the film, identifying the peculiar nature of Maitu community’s displacement (vertical rather than lateral, confining them to a space which cuts them off from the environment) as the reason for the rise of new forms of bodily exploitation. In my reading of the film, I want to argue that the corporeal hierarchies established within the community facilitate the emergence of what I term “fuelling bodies”, forcibly turned by the authoritarian governing body into sources of energy as the last existing natural resource to be exploited. Drawing on the theory of science fiction, Hagar Kotef’s writing on movement, and postcolonial theory, I close-read the film to explore the relationship it establishes between displacement and the bodily hierarchies that exist in the community. In turn, I argue that the nature of the Maitu community’s displacement gives rise to hindered freedom of movement, bodily oppression, and loss of communal ties and consequently prevents the community from addressing the legacy of the climate crisis, which has arrested them in stasis, leaving them unable to dream of better futures. As I demonstrate, it is only once Asha rejects and actively rebels against the imposed inhibitions of movement and leaves the spaces of containment that make up the Maitu community that she can realise the utopian post-apocalyptic process of renewal and rejuvenation, both for the natural environment and the human communities.  Dans cet article, je propose une analyse du court métrage Pumzi (2009) de Wanuri Kahiu, qui dépeint les conséquences d’une crise hydrique dévastatrice qui a contraint les communautés humaines d’Afrique de l’Est à vivre sous terre pour survivre. À la suite de chercheurs tels que Ritch Calvin, Kirk Bryan Sides ou Mich Nyawalo, qui ont analysé le film dans le contexte de son traitement des questions environnementales et de ses tendances afrofuturistes, je souhaite mettre en avant la fonction du corps dans le film, en identifiant la nature particulière du déplacement de la communauté Maitu (vertical plutôt que latéral, les confinant dans un espace qui les coupe de leur environnement) comme la raison de l’émergence de nouvelles formes d’exploitation corporelle. Dans mon analyse, je souhaite démontrer que les hiérarchies corporelles établies au sein de la communauté facilitent l’émergence de ce que j’appelle des « corps carburants », transformés de force par le pouvoir autoritaire en sources d’énergie, dernière ressource naturelle existante à exploiter. En m’appuyant sur la théorie de la science-fiction, les écrits de Hagar Kotef sur le mouvement et la théorie postcoloniale, j’ai analysé le film en détail afin d’explorer la relation qu’il établit entre le déplacement et les hiérarchies corporelles qui existent dans la communauté. À mon tour, je soutiens que la nature du déplacement de la communauté Maitu entraîne une restriction de la liberté de mouvement, une oppression corporelle et une perte des liens communautaires, empêchant ainsi la communauté de faire face à l’héritage de la crise climatique, qui l’a figée dans une situation de stagnation, la laissant incapable de rêver d’un avenir meilleur. Comme je le démontre, ce n’est qu’une fois qu’Asha rejette et se rebelle activement contre les inhibitions imposées au mouvement et quitte les espaces de confinement qui composent la communauté Maitu qu’elle peut réaliser le processus utopique post-apocalyptique de renouveau et de rajeunissement, tant pour l’environnement naturel que pour les communautés humaines.

\"Ghost Dances on Silver Screens: Pumzi and Older Than America\" is a meditation on the ghost artistry of filmmakers Wanuri Kahiu and Georgina Lightning. Ghosts are an embodiment of the invisible forces of a past that hasn't gone anywhere. Revealing what is normally concealed, ghosts are sacred/demonic tricksters who provide alternate perspectives on the here and now and on the future. Asha from Kahiu's Pumzi and Rain from Lightning's Older than America engage with the ghosts of their ancestors not as an exercise in nostalgia for a paradise lost nor as a scare-you-to-death adrenaline ride. Rain and Asha dance with the ancestors so that they might reorder the cosmos. They are futurists, reanimating and reinventing the world.

Director Wanuri Kahiu’s 2018 Rafiki made history when it became the first Kenyan film to be screened at the Cannes Film Festival. Adapted from Ugandan Monica Arac de Nyeko’s prize-winning short story “Jambula Tree” (2006), Rafiki builds upon an established tradition within filmic culture of translating textual narratives into audiovisual media. Within the African cinematic arena, however, the adaptation of oral performances to the screen has historically been the most common source of filmic expression. This article interrogates the continuities and changes Kahiu enacts in her conversion of the short story to film, with particular focus on the tensions and contradictions that arise from Rafiki’s particular way of framing the symbolic revolt of youth against hierarchical sources of authority and political structures. It is my contention that in its defiance of the institutional forces arrayed against same-sex desires and practices, the film launches a brand of revolution that at once echoes and radically departs from its literary substrate. As potential explanations for the deviations observed in Rafiki’s narrative thrust and visual presentation, I especially underscore the nods and callbacks to other films that predate and inspire the film’s celebration of female agency as a potent political weapon. Grounding my reflections within the broader discussion of adaptation studies, I begin my critical exploration by tracing Rafiki’s genesis in a literary work, then engage with the paradoxes and ambiguities that emerge from the film’s multiple competing and overlapping influences.

This article argues that Wanuri Kahiu's film Rafiki is an exemplar of worldmaking in queer African cinema. By analysing key scenes from the film, I uncover the ways in which Rafiki offers queer Kenyans a visual affirmation of a queer world which exists counter to the world of hegemonic heteronormativity in Kenya. Key contributors to Rafiki's worldmaking potential, I argue, are the director's use of tropes of futurity, horizon, and queer utopic space in the film's plot and narrative. Extending the idea of queer utopic space to the viewing experience of audiences, I show how the practice of queer worldmaking extended beyond the screen to the space inside the cinema in the seven days that the film's ban was relaxed and Rafiki was screened in Kenya.

This paper examines a number of African-authored narratives (novels and film) in the light of recent thinking about futurism and the role of speculative fiction as a means of envisioning the future. Uppinder Mehan, coeditor of the first ever anthology of “postcolonial science fiction and fantasy,” So Long Been Dreaming, notes that postcolonial writing has rarely “pondered that strange land of the future” and warns, “If we do not imagine our futures, postcolonial peoples risk being condemned to be spoken about and for again” (Mehan 270). Kodwo Eshun, in a seminal essay, expands on this to argue that, while the “practice of countermemory as . . . an ethical commitment to history, the dead and the forgotten” has traditionally relegated futurism to the sidelines of black creativity, this has been progressively challenged by “contemporary African artists . . . [for whom] understanding and intervening in the production and distribution of this dimension constitutes a chronopolitical act” (292). The paper proposes that this chronopolitical act (what in literature we now call speculative fiction) has its roots in African modes of storytelling that draw on myth, orality, and indigenous belief systems that lend themselves to the invention of personal mythologies, the rewriting of history in the light of future realities, and the use of extrarealist or magical phenomena as part of the everyday. Since these elements characterize many novels not thought of as speculative, this suggests that futurism has been a strain in African writing from its inception. The turn from mythic revisioning to speculative fiction as a distinct and recognizable genre in the 21st century has notably been embraced by women writers such as Nnedi Okorafor and Lauren Beukes, in whose work gender/femininity is a determinant in the projection of imagined futures. The paper examines how speculative narrative strategies in a range of texts are brought to bear on specific historical situations on the African continent (those characterized, for example, by genocide, civil war, cross-continental migration, urban dereliction, xenophobia, violence, and the occult) and the potential futures to which they point. The paper argues, therefore, that such narratives, rather than being relegated to the category of fantasy, deserve attention as key indicators of futuristic thinking.

Famous for her short science fiction film, Wanuri Kahiu has presented her first feature film at the 71st Cannes Festival in Un Certain Regard, the first Kenyan film to be selected at Cannes. Inspired by the book \"Jambula tree\" by Ugandan Monica Arac de Nyeko, the film, whose title means \"Friend\" in Swahili, has a rather classical construction: they start to get close pretty slowly, then there's the declaration of love, the scandal, followed by violence, the families trying to separate the two and finally, the epilogue a few years later. [...]this is what the filmmaker is fighting against, she wants to help change people's attitudes by deconstructing the violence faced by the members of the LGBT community. Olivier Barlet is author of Contemporary African Cinema (Michigan State University Press, 2016).

“Ghost Dances on Silver Screens: Pumzi and Older Than America” is a meditation on the ghost artistry of filmmakers Wanuri Kahiu and Georgina Lightning. Ghosts are an embodiment of the invisible forces of a past that hasn’t gone anywhere. Revealing what is normally concealed, ghosts are sacred/demonic tricksters who provide alternate perspectives on the here and now and on the future. Asha from Kahiu’s Pumzi and Rain from Lightning’s Older than America engage with the ghosts of their ancestors not as an exercise in nostalgia for a paradise lost nor as a scare-you-to-death adrenaline ride. Rain and Asha dance with the ancestors so that they might reorder the cosmos. They are futurists, reanimating and reinventing the world.

This article examines how both Bekolo and Kahiu deploy afrofuturist aesthetics in their films Les Saignantes and Pumzi in order to critique afro-pessimist perspectives from which socio-economic realities on the continent are often framed. Les Saignantes confronts the viewer with a question: \"How can you make an anticipation [or futuristic] film in a country that has no future?\" It is therefore by juxtaposing political realities against the narrative and aesthetic conventions of film genres that Bekolo seeks to interrogate the seemingly immutable perspectives from which African realities are examined or perceived. Both Bekolo and Kahiu's films are set in dystopic futures. Kahiu's film, Pumzi, seeks to question the fatality of present African realities by engaging dystopian politics. It is ultimately through the aesthetics of afro-futurism that both films manage to critique dominant ways of conceiving the African present by setting their works in alternative futures.