Africanfuturism: Decolonial Dreamwork and Developmental Rebellion

FAIN: FT-285673-22

Jenna N. Hanchey
University of Nevada, Reno (Reno, NV 89557-0001)

Completion of a book-length manuscript on the ways African authors imagine the future of Africa outside Western conceptions of global development.

Africanfuturism: Decolonial Dreamwork and Developmental Rebellion offers the first comprehensive investigation of Africanfuturism. This project examines how Africans envision and narrate their own futures in ways that counter neocolonial conceptualizations of global development that render Africa as the "zone of the absolute dystopia" (Eshun, 2003, p. 292). I argue that Africanfuturism resists logics of development in four main ways: by encouraging radical desire; finding potential within environmental ruin; using colonial technology against itself; and imagining life outside of capitalism.