Africanfuturism—a New Commonsense? Apocalypse as Sense-Making after the Crises of Postcolonial Modernity

Critical dystopia, apocalypse as myth of endings, and the longue durée of human cultural history are all circumscribed by the necessity of the future: they are subtended by the extrapolation/speculation of the present into the future, whether in plausible, possible, or annihilative terms. Concerning African postcolonial politics and its literary imagination however, there is a sense in which the paradigm of apocalypse as a sense-making framework and futurist narratives of critical (not classical) dystopian sensibility preempt, rehash, and connect with Mignolo’s ruminations on the rhetoric of modernity, Santos’s heterotopia and utopian-thinking, Sarr’s Afrotopia, and decoloniality’s emphasis on the crises of modernity/modern science. This paper is part of the author’s interdisciplinary project of thinking through this relation, the theoretical convergence of Africanfuturism and decoloniality as political projects, and their epistemic implications for postcolonial modernity, African future or utopia (i.e., Afrotopia), and the productions of contemporaneous realities in African literary imagination. In order to ground the perspectives posed here in more pragmatic terms, a close-reading of Chinelo Onwualu’s “Read Before Use” has been performed as a converging point for the arguments raised.