Ostalo
https://doi.org/10.38003/ccsr.1.1-2.5
Against the Idea of Africa as “Absolute Dystopia”: Pragmatism and Possibility in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah and After the Flare by Deji Bryce Olukotun
Paulette Coetzee
orcid.org/0000-0002-7704-6264
; Nelson Mandela University
Sažetak
This paper examines two works that anticipate Africa-centred futures as positive and
possible, without promising utopia. Americanah and After the Flare both embrace contradiction and complexity. Furthermore, their treatment of societies (mis)shaped by
historical violence includes acknowledgement of their own imbrication in global structures of capitalist modernity. Against the grim backdrop of rising inequality, resurgent
racism and the effects of climate change – a moment in which dystopic visions tend
to predominate – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Deji Bryce Olukotun’s novels embody
a kind of hope. Nonetheless, these alternatives to dystopia do not imagine that the
problems and abuses of the present might easily be overcome. Thus, despite their employment of popular genres that invite rather than disavow pleasure, these fictions do
not simply offer a form of escapism to distract us as the world burns. Rather, I would
argue, they provide useful perspectives on Africa, on race and on humanity, that also
have relevance in terms of current discourses of the Anthropocene. Before elaborating
my argument in relation to Adichie and Olukotun’s works, I will examine some aspects
of the contexts within and against which they operate – in terms of history, geography
and representation concerning race, blackness, humanity, and Africa.
Ključne riječi
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Deji Bryce Olukotun, blackness, ecology, Africa, science fiction
Hrčak ID:
328055
URI
Datum izdavanja:
31.12.2019.
Posjeta: 432 *