For the origins of the term Futures Industry, see Eshun, Kodwo, “ Further Considerations on Afrofuturism,” CR: The New Centennial Review 3. This last term is discussed in more detail in the “SF as Historical Intervention” section of this essay. The futures industry, a term introduced by Kodwo Eshun, combines the economic aspects of speculative futures trading with the colonization and predation of futurity in Africa by generally Western, capitalist enterprises.
Futurity relates to a qualitative notion of the future-as-difference, as opposed to a merely quantitative notion of the future, especially wherein the conditions of capitalist realism reduce any notions of the future to a mere extension or intensification of the conditions of the present. In the present essay, references to the future are meant in the simplest, most banal, quantitative aspect of temporality as passing time, as in tomorrow, or an hour from now. Ultimately, this requires a reconsideration of the work of the SF novum itself in line with Alain Badiou’s conception of the event, whereby the introduction of the SF novum of the alien can be seen as a placeholder for the unknowable, unforeseeable eruption of a radical, historical event: the reawakening of a seemingly structurally unrepresentable anticolonial subjectivity that is pitched against the ideological confines of the neoliberal present.ģ Throughout this essay it is necessary for me to distinguish between a group of terms related to the concept of “the future” as both the temporal and economic valences combine in what Mark Fisher refers to as “capitalist realism”: the sense that although time continues to pass, there is no radical historical progressiveness or sense of a future outside of the conditions of global late capitalism. Rather than merely incorporating the predominantly Americentric determinations of much Afrofuturist thought wholesale, however, the novel demands a rethinking of the role of the alien from an African-utopian perspective. Drawing on Afrofuturist criticism, this essay argues that Lagoon utilizes the figure of the alien in order to examine Nigeria as both an object of the neoliberal futures industry and a progenitor of radical anti-neoimperial futurity. In this light, Lagoon subverts the stock colonial ideology long associated with the first contact alien invasion narrative. This decentering of SF foremost demands a critical engagement with its dominant, operative tropes.
Nnedi Okorafor is a member of a growing vanguard of global SF/F authors who challenge the hegemony of SF as a purely Western genre.
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