The Posthuman in Contemporary Black African Diasporic Science Fiction

My thesis investigates narrative theorisations of the posthuman in fictions by three Black African diasporic science fiction writers: Nalo Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring (1998) and Midnight Robber (2000); Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti trilogy (Binti, 2015, Binti: Home, 2017 and Binti: The Night Masquerade, 2018); and Anthony Joseph’s The African Origins of UFOs (2008). I outline how these six texts contribute to and, importantly, disrupt critical posthumanism’s reconfiguration of liberal humanism’s conception of ‘the human’. In dialogue with Black feminist scholarship by those such as Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Katherine McKittrick, Christina Sharpe and Sylvia Wynter, the thesis explores how fictional narratives can be employed to denaturalise the hegemonic conception of Western Man, which continues to rest on the ontological negation of Black life. I describe the three writers discussed as continuing and extending a legacy of work by Black scholars and artists who, positioned as abject within Western modernity, have always disrupted the epistemic tenets of Man. I also situate these texts within scholarship on the ‘new animism’ (Laack, 2020) in order to highlight how tenets of African and African diasporic epistemologies and cultures exist as possible alternative genealogies for critical posthumanist discourses, which can disrupt the Euro-Western and white-centric tendencies that currently dominate the discipline. Hopkinson, Okorafor and Joseph’s writing, as well as the Black intellectual tradition drawn on throughout the thesis, inhabit ‘demonic grounds’ (Wynter, 1989; McKittrick, 2006) within critical posthumanism: absent presences that disrupt and transform tenets of the disciplines’ prevailing scholarship, ultimately reshaping conceptions of the posthuman.