A CRITICAL STUDY OF BUTLER’S KINDRED AND OKOROAFOR’S WHO FEARS DEATH

Afrofuturism is a counter-future saddled with three goals—to rewrite history, critique society and reclaim the future.  This paper illustrates that Butler’s Kindred and Okoroafor’s Who Fears Death distinctively captures the Afrofuturist view of the past, present and future seen through the black lens.  It does so by examining comparatively how the plot, thematic preoccupations and characters  in  the  novel  explicatively  portray  the  manifestations  of  Afrofuturism  through rewriting, recreating and reclaiming. It clearly exposes the falsehood in history that casts black people in a negative light, critiques the discrimination they experience and creates a Futurist narrative where racial prejudice will be exterminated. It also engages in the reversal of racial and gender stereotypes.  The study shows the double prejudice experienced by black females caused by the intersection of racial and gender discrimination. It aligns with the vision of Afrofuturism to create a future that changes orientations, seeks for freedom for all, and the creation of a society where race and gender do not have a stronghold.

CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION

1.1      Background to the Study

Contemporary African writers and Afrodiasporic writers have found ways to counteract stereotypical identities given to the black race through reclaiming history, critiquing the present and reimagining a future viewed through the black lens. The black race, from time immemorial, has been saddled with labels and stereotypes that picture her as unintelligent, irrational and backward. Alexander G. Weheliye has decried the preconceived notion where black subjects have been deemed as a “radical obverse of enlightened and rational man, which has led to the formation of various black discourses that will appropriate this category” (26). Stereotypes and prejudices have been created to see whiteness as the “norm” while the black race is viewed as the “other”. The appropriation of this category and the reversal of the stereotypes have been undertaken by black Afrofuturist writers.  This mode of narrative is made up of discourses which is a movement away from mainstream notion of history and race where the black race is viewed as docile, backward, antithetical to a progressive society and has no meaningful contribution to the future of the world.

The term, Afrofuturism, was coined in 1994 by Mark Dery when he stated thus: “speculative fiction that treats African-American themes and addresses African-American concerns in the context of twentieth-century technoculture—-and more generally, African- American signification that appropriates images of technology and a prosthetically enhanced future—- might, for want of a better term, be called “Afrofuturism” (180). Now, this concept has also been incorporated by African writers to address issues that concern the black race as well as black women. The goal of the genre is for black people to gain autonomy over their own story

which has been destroyed by the writers of history. As Gilbert Muller states: “black artistic truth reveals essentially a failure in the underlying structures of white Western civilization and a proposal to set right those destructive social and political forces in nature” (qtd.in Tali 67) . This is a branch of speculative fiction which is different from science fiction as we know it even though some writers incorporate elements of science fiction.  It is usually filled with traditions of Africa and sees the world through a black lens. Ishmael Reed, a speculative fiction writer, has used the word “necromancy” to describe this project which he has defined as “using the past to explain the present and to prophesize about the future” (qtd.in Nelson 7). African-American Afrofuturists seek a connection to an African perspective and thereby reclaim African cultures (Womack 91).

Afrofuturists make frequent use of African cultural expressions and historical leanings in their works in order to highlight their cultural importance. They achieve this by employing Afrofuturist tropes that include science fiction, neo-slave narratives, African mythology, magical realism, fantastical tales etc. Nalo Hopkinson has seen the use of reimagined world by black writers as an escapist mechanism which she says is the first step to creating a new reality. For her, speculative fiction is performing that act already as opposed to old traditional folk, fairy and epic tales. She sums it up by saying that the focus is always on “making the impossible possible” (98).  Lisa Yaszek has also noted that the interest of the genre in alternate history has made it unsurprising that authors who have been most closely associated with literary Afrofuturism have been fabulists such as Ishmael Reed and Amiri Baraka and science fiction authors such as Samuel Delany and Octavia Butler (299).  In line with building new truths, speculative fiction has been used to change the narratives with a focus on Afrocentrism which states “what was”, “what is” and “what will be” for the black race.   Alondra Nelson posits that the vision of the

elimination of race and gender is the “founding foundation of the digital age that presupposes

this genre” (1).

Similarly, Frantz Fanon tasks black writers with the goal of turning over a new leaf, working out new concepts and creating a “new man “(316). The new concept Fanon proposes comes in the form of Afrofuturism which its mode of representation exists in arts, music, films and in literature and this study will focus on its literary representation. This study examines the concept of Afrofuturism and how it has been explored in Kindred by Octavia Butler and Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okoroafor. It hopes to explore how history has been reclaimed and the future reimagined in the texts through a comparative study of the texts and how the characters, plot, themes and settings have been used to portray an Afrofuturist display of race, power and gender where we see the main characters, Onyesonwu in Who Fears Death and Dana in Kindred, who are female characters breaking the stereotypical identity given to the black race and black women. Historically, black women have suffered marginalization, oppression and misrepresentation on a higher scale than white women to this day. For black women, there is an intersection of racial and gender marginalization bringing about a double oppression in their lives. Dana, an African-American Slave, builds new truth about the African slave woman that has been portrayed in some narratives as docile as well as Onyesonwu who fights against the stereotype created for the female gender. This analysis will be achieved through a close reading of the two texts. This research illustrates that Butler’s Kindred and Okoroafor’s Who Fears Death distinctively captures the Afrofuturist views of the past, present and future where issues of power, race and gender are viewed through the black lens.

This study consists of five chapters. This chapter, which is the first chapter, will be dedicated to the introduction of the topic and what the study hopes to achieve, the second chapter

will be a review of related literature on what scholars have said about Afrofuturism in literature and the research that has been carried out in the primary texts, Kindred and Who Fears Death. The third chapter which comprises of the conceptual framework and research methodology will focus on defining the concept, what it entails as well as stating the method of research for this study.   The fourth chapter will house the main analysis of the study which will include an interpretive analysis of the primary texts in relation to the topic. The final chapter will be a summary of the study and the final conclusion.

1.2    Statement of the Problem

No study,  known to  me,  has  carried  out  a comparative analysis  of  the elements  of Afrofuturism in Kindred and Who Fears Death. Critical reflections on Kindred have mostly titled towards the area of racism and neo-slave narrative while a previous research on Who Fears Death scratched the surface level of the elements of Afrofuturism but does not go deep enough. Rather, the research focused largely on gender stereotypes and female genital mutilation. Therefore, this study hopes to undertake a comparative approach to the Afrofuturist leanings of Kindred and Who Fears Death and it plans to achieve this by going deeper to explore the Afrofuturist elements in the texts.

1.2 Purpose of the Study

New ways of viewing history, critiquing the present situation of the black race and pushing for  a  great  future is  the vision  of Afrofuturism  and  since  a  comparative study of Afrofuturism in the texts has not been carried out, my purpose in this study include:

    To  explore  comparatively the  Afrofuturist  views  of  the  past,  present  and  future  as represented in the texts.

    To examine comparatively what constitutes Afrofuturism and how the elements have been explored in the texts in addressing the issues of race, power and gender.

    To carry out a proper explication of the texts under study with the aim of showing how the plot, themes and characters have intersected to shape the black futuristic vision of reclaiming autonomy over their story, recreating society and reimagining the future.

    To show distinctively how Afrofuturism grants voices to black women who have been under represented in literature as well as stereotyped to be playing subordinate role to men.

        To present how Afrofuturism engages in the reversal of racial and gender stereotypes.

1.3   Significance of the Study

Counter narrative has always been the goal for most black writers and Afrofuturism has been created to take it a notch higher. Ron Eglash has noted that it is not enough to reverse the stereotypes and it is for this reason that we see the turn to Afrofuturism which will attempt to forge a new identity that puts “black cultural origins in categories of the artificial as much as in those of the natural (59). Blacks have been viewed as a powerless and regressive race that has no place in history and the future and this concept has been created to argue against the notion. It has been used by many scholars in arts, literature and music to reclaim history and create a reimagined future for black people so that generations yet unborn will not succumb to the identity construct given to the black race in a white dominated world. This study also explores how Afrofuturism pushes for equality for everyone irrespective of race and gender.   It is this level of commitment that the narratives that exist in Kindred and Who Fears Death has explored and this has made this research useful as it hopes to bring to the limelight the black futuristic narrative inherent in the texts through a comparative study.

1.4  Scope of the Study

The scope of this study is limited to a comparative study of the two texts, Kindred andWho Fears Death, and how the elements of Afrofuturism have manifested in them.

₦5,000.00 – DOWNLOAD FULL PROJECT DOWNLOAD FULL PROJECT Added to cart

---

---

---

---

---

Related Project Topics :