Narrating African FutureS

This volume is dedicated to fictional negotiations of future, or rather futureS. After all, 'future' cannot but exist in a multitude of complementary and/or competing futures, all causally related to each other just as much as to their pasts and their respective memories. Within this cyclical and causal triad of past, present and future, futureS have been made and unmade, remembered and forgotten, affirmed and subverted in the multiversity of competing agencies, interests, and accesses to power and privileges. Thus framed, African and African diasporic futureS have been done, undone and redone over the centuries, affecting and affected by planetary actions as ruled by global power constellations, whilst being contemplated and moulded by fictional in(ter)ventions in the process. Literature and other cultural means of expression such as film, fine arts, performing arts and the internet are at the centre of this volume. Employing FutureS as a critical category of analysis, the book comprises perspectives from Europe, Africa and the Middle East, from academics, activists and artists. They all share their perspectives on African and African-diasporic visions of futureS, with an emphasis on dreaming and memory, environmentalism and ethics, freedom and resistance. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of the African Literature Association.

Susan Arndt is a Literature Professor who has studied and worked in Berlin, London, Frankfurt/Main, Oxford and Bayreuth with a focus on futurity, racism, Shakespeare and African feminism. Nadja Ofuatey-Alazard is an African-German author, filmmaker/producer, editor, culture activist and managing/artistic director of the NGO Each One Teach One (EOTO) in Berlin.

Preface - On futureS, or: the future is on 1. Dream*hoping memory into futureS: reading resistant narratives about Maafa by employing futureS as a category of analysis 2. Diaspora dynamics: shaping the future of literature 3. I am a fundamentalist of freedom 4. Do African digital natives wear glass skirts? 5. Digital Africa 6. Black face in hyperspace 7. Pumzi; the labyrinth of futureS 8. Whiteness and future environmentalism in J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace (1999) 9. Contemporary Cameroon poetry in English, nature and the politics of consciousness raising for the future 10. Ayi Kwei Armah's secular egalitarian Africa: an authentic vision or a utopian dialectic 11. Khal Torabully. "Coolies" and corals, or living in transarchipelagic worlds 12. In transition: self-expression in recent African LGBTIQ narratives