African Literary Future/isms: Collective and Speculative Approaches

Abstract

This article assesses how the ‘collective’ and the ‘speculative’ emerge as intertwined conceptual models for imagining and concretising notions of the ‘future’ in contemporary African literatures. We argue that contemporary literary production from the continent is engaged in acts of conceptual and linguistic-decentring, or what Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o has developed as a theory of ‘globalectics’ (2012). Beginning with Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor’s channelling of a Pan-African collective consciousness in her keynote address to the European Conference on African Studies (2023), we move on to explore three aspects of African literary futures/isms: first, the idea of historical repair and the notion that the speculative mode often hinges on multidirectional community-making by reconfiguring the past; second, the way speculative ventures establish new material networks and readerships through South–South translation projects that themselves project speculative cartographies of connection and the revival of historical ties; third, how continental African speculative fiction disrupts the binaries between the local and the global by creating new spatial imaginaries invested in cosmological and philosophical materialities. We conclude that such a diverse focus allows us to open out the terms of our discussion to the wider implications of decolonial future-making from the perspective of a de-hierarchical, globalectically oriented view of contemporary African writing. As such, we imagine this article as an act of collaborative co-creation which is in conversation with two contemporary African writers – Novuyo Rosa Tshuma and Wole Talabi – whose works are among those discussed in the piece. Their interviews form the ‘Appendix’ to this article, and offer new directions for creative and critical re-negotiations of African literary futures.