The politics of death in the selected Afrofuturist works of Nalo Hopkinson, Nnedi Okorafor, and Wanuri Kahiu

This dissertation explores the politics of death in the selected Afrofuturist works of three Black women: Nalo Hopkinson, Nnedi Okorafor, and Wanuri Kahiu. The aim of this study is twofold: (1) to decentre in the Afrofuturist discourse the fixation on African American works (which have largely focused on Black experiences in the United States and been underpinned by masculinist concerns) by focalizing the works of Black women working from other Black traditions in Africa and the Caribbean, and (2) to provide a critical lens for appreciating Black women’s Afrofuturisms. Through a close, critical, and contextual reading of five works—including Hopkinson’s novels Brown Girl in the Ring (1998) and Midnight Robber (2000), Okorafor’s novels Who Fears Death (2010) and The Book of Phoenix (2015), and Kahiu’s short film Pumzi (2009)—I underscore the authors’ concerns with historical and contemporary colonial and political orders of death (necropolitics/necropower) aimed at a future without Black people. In these women’s works, this necropolitical order that aims to bring about a future without Black lives is also a gendered order. Its gendered politics is mostly expressed in the way it marks the Black woman’s body as a site of Black death, a site wherein it must wage and win the war over the future of Blackness. Under the regime of colonial necropolitics, as imagined in these women’s works, the Black woman’s body is targeted with different forms of violence aiming to sterilize and/or kill it both for the sustenance of colonial society and for realizing a future devoid of Black presence, or a future based on the permanent injury and subjection of Black people. In recognizing and identifying this necropolitical and patriarchal condition against Black lives in general and Black women in particular, the Black women artists whose works I discuss in the dissertation imagined prospects for alternative Black futures. In their Afrofuturist reimagining of Black survival and futurity, these women populate their works with heroic Black women who confront different orders of death, women whose victorious struggles against these forces of death offer alternative prospects for Black and other futures. I argue in the study that the underlying counter politics (against colonial/patriarchal necropolitics) of these women’s Afrofuturisms is founded on different projects of reproductive futurity based on Black women’s resistance acts and leadership. My study suggests that the vision of reproductive futurity in these works is both an affirmative response against Black deaths and a radical act of Black women’s liberation.

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