“Liminal Figures of Futurity”: Mohale Mashigo’s Use of Speculative Fiction in Intruders

Novelists and other cultural producers have long employed the African continent as a palimpsest to construct fantastical tales. From Sir John Mandeville to Joseph Conrad, Africa’s blank spaces on the map have been filled with monstrous creatures that fuel the western imagination. As a consequence, this constant othering of the so-called ‘Dark Continent’ has had a deleterious impact for African states and their citizenries, as spectacularly evidenced in U.S. President Donald Trump’s now-infamous labelling of the entire continent as a host of ‘shithole countries’. This article wrestles with the continuation of this trend in popular culture via an empirical examination of the speculative fiction of the British novelist and performance artist, B. Catling. Publishing in 2015, The Vorrh is the first of the three novels set in a parallel Africa, specifically a former German colony that is home to remnants of the Garden of Eden. Focusing on the enchanted forest known as the Vorrh and the colony’s (fictional) capital, Essenwald, this article employs methods drawn from geocriticism and popular geopolitics to interrogate Catling’s built-world. This is done with the aim of connecting structures of iteration in the representation of fictional ‘Africas’ to the West’s imperially inflected geopolitical codes towards the actual physical and human geographies that constitute the world’s second largest and most populous continent.

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The ante-tempus novel: prevention and patienthood in recent speculative fiction

Textual Practice ◽

10.1080/0950236x.2017.1365757 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 33 (6) ◽

pp. 983-1003

Author(s):

Benedetta Liorsi

Keyword(s):

Speculative Fiction

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Crossing the (Trans)Gender Bridge: Exploring Intersex and Trans Bodies in Canadian Speculative Fiction

Studies in Global Science Fiction - Canadian Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror ◽

10.1007/978-3-030-15685-5_12 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 203-218 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Evelyn Deshane

Keyword(s):

Speculative Fiction

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Plant Life and More-than-human Agency in Zainab Amadahy’s Resistance

New Horizons in English Studies ◽

10.17951/nh.2021.6.79-91 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 6 ◽

pp. 79-91

Author(s):

Paula Wieczorek

Keyword(s):

Human Agency ◽

Speculative Fiction ◽

Human Beings ◽

Bruno Latour ◽

Donna Haraway ◽

Cultural Violence ◽

The Earth ◽

Plant Life ◽

As If

For centuries humans have acted as if the environment was passive and as if the agency was related only to human beings. Both Indigenous and non-Indigenous writers, scholars, and artists express the need to narrate tales about the multitudes of the living earth, which can help perceive the Earth as vibrant and living. The following paper discusses Black/Cherokee Zainab Amadahy’s speculative fiction novel 2013 Resistance as an example of a story resisting the claim about human beings as the ultimate species. The paper initially scrutinizes the phenomena of “plant blindness” and then explores how Zainab Amadahy illustrates plant life in her book. Unlike in traditional literary depictions of botany, the writer presents tobacco as an active and responsive agent that influences the characters, which, consequently, opposes anthropocentrism. The article also addresses the cultural violence and disregard that has dominated the Western perception of animistic cultures and expresses the need to rethink the theory of animism. This paper draws from posthumanist writings by scholars including Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour, Jane Bennett, and Stacy Alaimo. It also refers to some of the most influential contributions to critical plant studies made by Indigenous thinkers such as Robin Wall Kimmerer’ s Braiding Sweetgrass (2013).

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