Speculative Fiction and Race

Although slowly improving in this regard, speculative fiction remains overwhelmingly white. That is, despite being a genre that critiques the social order and imagines alternative ones, a shockingly high percentage of published science fiction and fantasy is written by white authors (Harrison). Unsurprisingly, then, as André Carrington argues, the genre has yet to disentangle itself from the structures and assumptions of white supremacy.

However, speculative fiction by African authors – Nigerian authors in particular – has been flourishing in recent years. The founding of the African Speculative Fiction Society in 2016 is just one indication of the rising tide of African science fiction and fantasy. It may be helpful to frame these trends – both the traditional whiteness (and maleness) of science fiction and its recent African upsurge – as a generic context for students. A few useful sources are:

• André Carrington, “The Unbearable Whiteness of Science Fiction”
• Moradewun Adejunmobi, “Introduction: African Science Fiction,” as well as the rest of this special issue of The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry

Afrofuturism

Because Who Fears Death is so multi-generic even under the umbrella of speculative fiction, it can be challenging to frame for students. A useful place to start, therefore, is with Okorafor’s own self-classification. Okorafor is very clear that she does not see herself as writing Afrofuturist novels. However, students may find it helpful to get some familiarity with this term before moving on.

Two possibilities for opening up Afrofuturism for students are:

1. To assign “Black to the Future” by Mark Dery, in which Dery coins the term Afrofuturism. And to assign, alongside Dery, a critique of his framing, such as Hope Wabuke’s essay "Afrofuturism, Africanfuturism, and the Language of Black Speculative Literature."Wabuke argues that Dery’s conception “lacks room to conceive of Blackness outside of the Black American diasporaora Blackness independent from any relationship to whiteness.” Her essay also draws on Okorafor, which is very useful.
2. It is also possible to skip over Dery altogether and assign Jonita Davis’s essay "How Black Women are Reshaping Afrofuturism," which offers students an accessible entry point to Afrofuturism from a Black writer’s point of view and sets up a conversation about the intersection of speculative fiction and gender.

Of course, all three essays can be assigned, depending on the time constraints and reading load of any given course.

Africanfuturism

Okorafor vocally refuses the label Afrofuturism for her work, arguing that this genre retains the West at its center. Instead, she calls herself an author of “Africanfuturism.” In a short blog post called "Africanfuturism Defined,"which can be assigned to students, she writes that “Africanfuturism [...] does not privilege or center the West[, ...] is concerned with visions of the future, is interested in technology, leaves the earth, skews optimistic, [...] and it is rooted first and foremost in Africa.” Here Okorafor’s own words can help students understand Who Fears Death as speculative fiction that specifically rejects an origin point in Western culture, instead locating its own epistemological and ontological emergence entirely within Africa.

And Okorafor’s continued elaboration that Africanfuturism is “less concerned with 'what could have been’ and more concerned with 'what is and can/will be,’” and that “[i]t acknowledges, grapples with and carries 'what has been,’” is very useful for thinking through some of the thematics of temporality in Who Fears Death (more below).

Race and Apocalypse

Set in what we assume is the aftermath of our own racist imperial timeline, and facing a new potential annihilation that stems in large part from colorism, Who Fears Death is thoroughly concerned with the entanglements of apocalypse and race. Readings that help unpack this particular overlap include:

• Kyle P. White, “Indigenous science (fiction) for the Anthropocene”
• Kathryn Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None
• Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses”
• Déborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro,The Ends of the World

Framing texts like these help students and instructors explore the ways that apocalyptic literature can be tied to (or can reject) white constructs of historical time.

Literary Criticism Etc.

Useful sources for augmenting students’ literary analysis of Who Fears Death include:

• Nnedi Okorafor, “Meanings and Pronunciations,” which is Okorafor’s own discussion of the pan-African and deeply meaningful origins of her characters’ names
• Joshua Yu Burnett, “The Great Change and the Great Book: Nnedi Okorafor’s Postcolonial, Post-Apocalyptic Africa and the Promise of Black Speculative Fiction”

Gender and Sexual Violence

This particular lesson plan focuses on race, but it is vitally important to note that Who Fears Death contains multiple graphic scenes of sexual assault, and educators may want to frame this for students in ways that range from trigger warnings to critical/theoretical engagement with representations of violence. One possibility, not discussed here, would be to organize a discussion around the notion of sexual violence as itself a form of catastrophe, asking students to what extent it is in fact the central catastrophe of the novel. This might be usefully linked to what is often an uncomfortable discussion about the child sexual assault committed by the author of the British novel The Purple Cloud (for more on this, see MacLeod).

Africanfuturism and the Novel on Its Own Terms

I begin by asking students to think through many of the novel’s plot elements and thematic concerns related to sexual violence, racism and colorism, and tribal conflict. I guide students through an analysis of these ideas without placing the Who Fears Death into dialogue with any of our British texts, instead taking it on its own terms.

Using both the novel and the paired readings, we then look to both the idea of Afrofuturism and Okorafor’s own term, Africanfuturism, to help us think about how genre reveals the novel’s thematic elements. This helps students more deeply understand the idea of Africanfuturism as a genre in which juju is technology, Blackness is constitutional, and Africa is the world. It also shines light on Who Fears Death’s interest in imperialism and violence as a facet of intra-African conflict rather than Western force.

Temporality and Catastrophe

I next ask students to build on our understanding of the novel’s themes by free writing on the following question: What is the catastrophe of this novel? Although this sounds like a content question, our discussion here often turns towards the novel’s form. For instance, students may recognize how, in Onyesonwu’s world, catastrophe is not a narrative destination but a setting, an ongoing backdrop, a threat to historical time, and even a side effect of narrative itself.

Naturally this conversation tends toward questions of temporality – both the temporality of the novel, and the world historical temporality it imagines. And central to the concept of Africanfuturism is its slantwise relationship to Western notions of progress as historical time.

As such, I guide the conversation towards the rather difficult question, What historical timeline does this novel imagine Africa to belong to? As students grapple with this, I will push them to expand their analysis by introducing, throughout the conversation, pieces of evidence such as:

• The references to a deep past before the world of the novel, an “Old Age” in Africa that has passed away
• The ruins of a technological past that seems to resemble the early twenty-first century but has no specificity
• The novel’s refusal to offer a causal connection between the old age and the new, other than a sense of apocalyptic transition
• The fact that this far-future setting is in no way utopian, nor entirely dystopian
• The seemingly cyclical or perhaps perpetual nature of gendered and racialized violence, which Onyesonwu must still fight to change even in the distant future
• Onyesonwu’s discovery of a faraway verdant landscape that seems to suggest a vision of ecological hope in a future beyond this novel
• The fact that the novel’s climax revolves not around a violent showdown but the rewriting of a book that contains Africa’s narrative
• The resemblance of Onyesonwu’s story to a bildungsroman, but with many of her own deaths in the middle and no clear conclusion at the end

Each of these is an inflection point for thinking about the novel’s conception of catastrophic temporality. (They also offer moments of potential comparison with the British texts we have already discussed, such as War of the Worlds and The Battle of Dorking.) By moving through them, we come to see Who Fears Death as erecting its own temporal formal structures, beyond the Western imperial progress narrative and the bildungsroman. Who Fears Death imagines an Africa whose past and future are fully African and whose vision of history is self-determining, anti-teleological, and formally elusive. An Africa that experiences catastrophe less as plot and more as setting. An Africa whose heroes and villains are all African, and in which Europeans simply do not exist.

In these ways, Who Fears Death offers a rebuttal both to the content of British apocalyptic literature, which is steeped in the anxieties of imperial supremacy, and also to its forms.

Reading Who Fears Death in a British Literature Class

Finally, I invite students to grapple with what it means for us to read a novel that is so clearly invested in self-authorization through the lens of British literature.

Okorafor’s Africa is palimpsestic already, as its future-present emerges from in between a familiar but indistinct past and a hopeful but evasive future. She omits any reference to the West’s era of imperial violence, but nonetheless it is possible to read its presence through metonymic association with the violent imperialism coming from her Africa’s “West.” I ask students: Should we as readers see European and U.S. American imperialism as another of the novel’s palimpsestic settings by way of its absence – or is this reading itself an imperial practice?

The following passage, in which Onyesonwu leaves her body and “travels” far to the east with a Kponyungo guide, encountering a verdant landscape she never imagined possible in her desert world, is a helpful place to locate this discussion:

Kponyungo and I flew over vast lands; the dryness I had always known. Sand. Hardpan. Stunted trees. Dry dead grass....

A long time and a long distance later, the land below suddenly changed. The trees we passed were taller here. We flew faster. So fast that all I could see was light brown. Then ... green ...

Greeeeen! As I’d never seen it. As I’d never imagined it....From horizon to horizon the ground was alive with dense high leafy trees. Is this even possible? I wondered. Does this place really exist?

I met the Kponyungo’s eyes and they glowed a deeper orange-yellow. “It does,” she said.

My chest ached, but it was a good ache. It was an ache of...home. This place was too far to ever get to. But maybe someday it would not be. Maybe someday. (310-311)

What I ask students about this passage is: “Does this scene comment on the climatological disaster unleashed by Western industrialism?” On the one hand, because this vision stands in such stark contrast to both the unforgiving desert land of Onyesonwu’s daily life and the half-buried ruins of motherboards and monitors that seem to point to twenty-first century catastrophe, it is tempting to answer the above question, “Yes.” On the other hand, the novel also evades such a reading, placing this ecosystem outside of a rationalized space-time that might have anything to do with our own current narrative of collapse.

We close our conversation by asking how and to what extent we ought to do what we’ve just done: reading Who Fears Death contrapuntally with Victorian literature.

Maps

In my catastrophe class, one student per text is assigned to chart all of that text’s locations on Google Maps, so that together we can visually analyze its geographic priorities. This exercise often illuminates Britain’s heliocentric self-imagining within global stories, and it also reveals the narrative blank space that Africa typically occupies on Britain’s mental map of the world.

This cannot be done (or at least not in the same way) with Who Fears Death, because its far-future setting is so unmoored from any familiar geographic markers as to make the exercise nearly impossible. And so instead of mapping this novel, I lead my students in a discussion of how its un-mappability helps further reveal its outside-ness to imperial structures of thought.

However, it might prove fruitful – in a class with some time devoted to theories and practices of mapping – to consider how the geography of the novel, and the characters’ journeys across Africa, could in fact be visualized. Would such a project begin on a contemporary map of Sudan, or on a blank piece of paper? (If taught alongside King Solomon’s Mines by H. Rider Haggard, that novel’s hand-drawn treasure map might be a provocative contrapuntal starting place.)

To do this project justice would likely require some discussion of both the imperial implications of mapping, as well as Who Fears Death’s thematic gestures towards the ongoing civil war, genocide, and sexual violence in twenty-first-century Sudan. Katherine McKittrick’s Demonic Grounds could help students theorize cartography within the contexts of Blackness and violence.

Other Possibilities

Although I have not assigned these projects, I could easily see them being exciting to students and productive of good thinking:

• Invite students to write the introduction essays for two texts – say War of the Worlds and Who Fears Death – if they were each to appear in a publisher’s world literature series.
• Invite students to choose a character from Who Fears Death and write a book review of War of the Worlds from their point of view.
• Invite students to imagine a formal debate between two parties over the question of the term “Victorian” and script that debate as though Who Fears Death and a British text are the two debaters.
• Invite students to begin with Wells’s and Okorafor’s texts and to build a syllabus that includes both (on a different subject and with different texts than ours, of course.)

Assessment in each of these cases would, I think, include traditional metrics such as attention to textual detail and insightfulness of analysis, but might also extend to how fully students are able to unpack Victorian assumptions about catastrophe: its causes, loci, and protagonists – in other words, its form.

Takeaways

What this lesson plan has aimed to do is to show, through the example of Who Fears Death, some of what “undisciplining” can accomplish. What Okorafor offers to students is a chance to see the very ontological and historiographical assumptions of British literature otherwise. More specifically, her novel speaks vividly to the ways that “apocalypse” is not just literary content but rather a shaping social force that is at once contingent, political, and extremely revealing of the violent whiteness of the Western historiographic imagination. For that reason, it pairs especially well with Victorian texts like War of the Worlds, The Battle of Dorking, and Pharos the Egyptian, all of which articulate British anxieties about reverse colonization and their own extinction. (Haggard’s She would also be a very good text to use in this way.) Who, indeed, fears death has a lot to tell us about whose apocalypse is actually unfolding and why.

Endnotes

1. I have elected not to use the name of this author, who committed child sexual assault. The novel remains a very useful text, but his name is better lost to history. See MacLeod for more. Back to text

Bibliography

Adejunmobi, Moradewun. “Introduction: African Science Fiction.” Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, vol. 3, no. 3, 2016, pp. 265-72.

Burnett, Joshua Yu. “The Great Change and the Great Book: Nnedi Okorafor’s Postcolonial, Post-Apocalyptic Africa and the Promise of Black Speculative Fiction.” Research in African Literatures, vol. 46, no. 4, 2015, pp. 133-50.

Carrington, André “The Unbearable Whiteness of Science Fiction.” Open Democracy, 2016.

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “The Climate of History: Four Theses.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 35, 2009, pp. 197-222.

Chesney, George. The Battle of Dorking: Reminiscences of a Volunteer. G.P. Putnam & Sons, 1871.

Davis, Jonita. “How Black Women Are Reshaping Afrofuturism.” Yes Magazine, 2020.

Dery, Mark. “Black to the Future.” Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture, Duke University Press, 1994.

Harrison, Niall. “Sci-Fi Media Coverage Dominated by Men, Survey Shows.” The Guardian, 2016.

Kolbert, Elizabeth. “Welcome to the Anthropocene.” The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, Henry Holt and Company, 2014.

MacLeod, Kirsten. “M. P. Shiel and the Love of Pubescent Girls: The Other ‘Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name.'” English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920, vol. 51, no. 4, 2008, pp. 355-80.

McKittrick, Katherine. Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle. University of Minnesota Press, 2006.

Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Harvard University Press, 2011.

Okorafor, Nnedi. Africanfuturism Defined. 2019.

---. Meanings and Pronunciations in Who Fears Death. 2013.

---. Who Fears Death. DAW Books, 2010.

Smith, Zadie. “Postscript: Contempt as a Virus.” Imitations, Penguin Books, 2020.

Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo, and Déborah Danowski. The Ends of the World. Polity Press, 2016.

Wabuke, Hope. “Afrofuturism, Africanfuturism, and the Language of Black Speculative Literature.” Los Angeles Review of Books, 2020.

Wells, H. G. The War of the Worlds. Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1898.

Whyte, Kyle P. “Indigenous Science (Fiction) for the Anthropocene: Ancestral Dystopias and Fantasies of Climate Change Crises.” Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 2018, pp. 224-42.

Yusoff, Kathryn. A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. University of Minnesota Press, 2018.

Developer Biography

Jessie Reeder is Associate Professor of English at Binghamton University, specializing in nineteenth-century British literature, imperialism, and form. Her book, The Forms of Informal Empire: Britain, Latin America, and Nineteenth-Century Literature (Johns Hopkins 2020), won the Sonya Rudikoff Prize for the best first book in Victorian studies from the Northeast Victorian Studies Association. Her essays appear in Victorian Literature and Culture, Studies in English Literature, Studies in Romanticism, and more. Jessie is also an organizing member of Anglophone Chile, a project to digitize the newspapers printed by anglophone settlers in mid-nineteenth-century Chile.