The politics of death in Nnedi Okorafor’s Africanfuturist Novels

Abstract

Abstract This essay discusses the politics of death in Nnedi Okorafor’s early novels, Who Fears Death and The Book of Phoenix, not least because both novels are linked and underscore the writer’s commitments to necropolitics. Both novels also highlight death worlds founded on genocides and the eradication of minoritized and racialized bodies. I show that Okorafor’s artistic commitments in both works are organized around a critique of the necropolitical conditions of past and contemporary imperial world orders. At the heart of this critique is the Black woman, whom Okorafor positions at the crucial interfaces of alternative future worlds founded on visions of martyrdom and renewal/transfiguration as necessary in the struggle against necropower.