Reframing the post-apocalypse in Black British film: the dystopian Afrofuturism of Welcome II the Terrordome and Shank

Abstract

ABSTRACT The Afrodiasporic experience after the Armageddon of slavery, Afrofuturism has long theorized, is essentially post-apocalyptic. However, while the end of the world is conceptually at the heart of the Afrofuturist imagination, it is still relatively rare as a diegetic event. This article seeks to highlight how two British films, Ngozi Onwurah’s dystopian Welcome II the Terrordome (1994) and Mo Ali’s Shank (2010) explore the ambivalence of Black British futurity as imagined under the conditions of such new apocalypses. With recourse to the Public Enemy-inspired Armageddon effect and the resulting modernist alienation/Alien Nation, Terrordome’s and Shank’s engagements with the apocalypse address Afrofuturism’s inherent complication of resulting from a critique of Armageddon, without, however, reproducing its (epistemological) violence. In so doing, this article outlines how both films seek to make visible the potency of Afrofuturist filmmaking to reclaim the genres, traits, tropes, and narrative mechanisms of futurity even under the most averse, antiblack future conditions. Central to such considerations are both films’ Afrofuturistic chronopolitics of circularity and simultaneity, as well as their self-reflexive engagement with Afrofuturist tropes, such as the Igbo Landing Myth (Terrordome) or spatial transgressions and the erasure of cartographic sureties, such as clearly delineated borders (Shank).