‘Being very human in one of the most inhuman cities in theworld’: Lagos as a Site of Africanfuturist Invasion in Lagoon& Godhunter

Summary

In 1982, Salman Rushdie's report on an Asian writers’ conferencewas titled, by the editor of TheTimes of London, ‘The Empire Writes Back with aVengeance’. (8) This rather sensationalized headline has becomeparadigmatic of ‘postcolonial’ – read non-Anglo-Saxon – writingand, to this day, experiments in English-language writing bywriters of colour are still considered ‘rebellious’ by theliterary establishment. This paradigm imagines aggression whereit might not exist, and insurrection where there is merelyexpression. Yet, many writers of African futures today haveabandoned this particular posture of ‘desecration’ – if everthey took it up – and turned their foci inward. The futures theyimagine have broken away from the toxic embrace of neoliberal –neocolonial – dependence and victimization; the centres to whichmany writers respond, with which they communicate, are no longerlocated in ‘the West’ but in Africa. Africa, in thesecontemporary visions, has always been the centre – as memory andcultural repository, but also as future world. This recentringof Africa is pertinent to the question of African literature –in its many permutations – and its relationship to‘Afrofuturism’, the ‘speculative fiction that treatsAfrican-American themes and addresses African-American concernsin the context of twentieth-century technoculture’ (Dery ‘Blackto the Future’: 180). Yet, as we continue to forge Africa'sfutures – literary and otherwise – and as we are reminded of theimperatives of decolonization, both within and outside of theacademy, ‘Afrofuturism’ must also be interrogated for itsrelevance and pertinence to conversations about Black futuresoutside of the United States. In the move to release ourselvesfrom one ill-fitting paradigm for African writing, we might betoo hasty in adopting another one.

‘Afrofuturism’, the label given to the creative output of peopleracialized as ‘Black’ in the United States, was first used bywhite cultural critic Mark Dery in the introduction to hiscollection of interviews, ‘Black to the Future’ (1994). Derylimits his enquiries about science fiction to African-Americanwriters, whom he identifies as members of ‘a community whosepast has been deliberately rubbed out, and whose energies havesubsequently been consumed by the search for legible traces ofits history’ (180).