“Space Probe”: Science fiction across the Black Atlantic. The speculative geographies of Amiri Baraka and Emmanuel Dongala

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article focuses on the literary genealogy that connects “Answers in Progress” (1967), a short story by Amiri Baraka (formerly known as LeRoi Jones) to Emmanuel Dongala’s “Jazz and Palm Wine” (1982). Both texts are significant because of their respective incorporation of science-fiction elements which constituted a fringe phenomenon in African and African American literature at the time of their publication. Baraka and Dongala create speculative geographies – populated by humans and aliens alike – that offer alternative visions of black liberation in the US and the Congo. As early examples of Afrofuturism, the two short stories aim to transform existing narratives about Africans and African Americans by representing them as vehicles of revolution and social change. Despite the similarities, Dongala’s transposition of Baraka’s story into an African context generates changes in structure, language, and plotline, which ultimately lead to a rearticulation of racial conflict, otherness, and black identity.