Afro-Centered Futurisms in Our Speculative Fiction

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With creative essays from award-winning African writers of black speculative fiction, this engaging and approachable book seeks to address the lack of critical conversations on Afrofuturism and Afro-centered futurisms from people who intimately understand the continent and its traditions. Since the terms creation in the 1990s by Mark Dery, scholarly essays and books on Afrofuturism have increasingly reimagined the past and present experiences of the African diaspora, exploring what black futures could look like. Unified by a shared heritage, writers of African descent have their differential languages, cultures, and stories that diversify their critical articulations of a reimagined Africa. Afro-Centered Futurisms in Our Speculative Fiction features scholarly essays that are critical and cultural interrogations of African fiction, showcasing how each author's work engages with a specifically Afro-centered futurism. Authors and award winners including Eugen Bacon, Nuzo Onoh, Cheryl S. Ntumy, Dare Segun Falowo, Dilman Dila, Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki, and Shingai Njeri Kagundan provide boldly hybrid chapters (both creative and scholarly) that interface Afrocentric artefacts and exegesis. Through ethnographic reflections and intense scrutinies of African writing, these writers contribute open and diverse reflections of "Afrofuturism," "Africanfuturism," and "Africanjujuism." The authors in Afro-Centered Futurisms in Our Speculative Fiction are intrinsic participants in this important conversation on the rise of black speculative fiction that explores diversity and social (in)justice and charts poignant stories with black hero/ines who remake their worlds in a color zone of their own image.

Author Bio

Eugen Bacon, MA, MSc, PhD, is an African Australian author of Writing Speculative Fiction: Creative and Critical Approaches (Bloomsbury, 2019) and several novels and fiction collections. She is a 2022 World Fantasy Award finalist, and her Danged Black Thing was a finalist in the 2023 BSFA, Foreword, Aurealis and Australian Shadows Awards, and made the Otherwise Award Honor List. Her recent books include Mage of Fools (novel), Chasing Whispers (collection) and An Earnest Blackness (essays). Visit her website at eugenbacon.com and Twitter feed at @EugenBacon.