The human after math: Nnedi Okorafor’s unruly engagements with Cartesian desire

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article contends that Nnedi Okorafor remakes a European Enlightenment notion of mathematics in her speculative trilogy Binti (2015-2018). The titular character has the power of mathematical thinking, where through the contemplation of mathematical signs, she absents herself from her immediate physical surroundings and enters into a dream-like space. Reading Binti alongside Descartes’ Discourse on the Method, I argue that Okorafor draws on an Enlightenment notion of mathematics as training in reason, where it was believed that through the encounter with mathematical objects, man could learn to think independently of their cultural and religious backgrounds, becoming universal. Her critique of Enlightenment math is not explicit, but rather raises philosophical questions about what exactly math is and how it could have secured the secular human. Binti reveals that math is a linguistic technology for producing imaginative realms detached from the real world that could allow for different experiences of becoming. Okorafor’s work brings mathematics in conversation with literature and also Fanon’s thinking about race and the body. This essay examines how African speculative fiction can intervene in modern liberal notions of the human by interrogating and remaking the seemingly objective discourses that make up our current hegemonic mode of being human.