TY - JOUR
T1 - Fashioning Africanfuturism
T2 - African comics, Afrofuturism, and Nnedi Okorafor’s Shuri
AU - Hodapp, James
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
PY - 2022
Y1 - 2022
N2 - Internationally renowned Nigerian-American sci-fi writer Nnedi Okorafor recently wrote that she no longer wants her work to be considered Afrofuturism, preferring her own term Africanfuturism. Okorafor argues that despite the potential for Afrofuturism to underscore global Blackness, in practice it has privileged African American concerns while marginalising those of Africa. Okorafor, whose work includes several comics including Black Panther, Shuri, and LaGuardia, argues that her work should be understood as explicitly African rather than part of the Black diaspora. She puts this notion into practice by writing novels and comics set in Africa with African characters ‘sometimes with aliens, sometimes with witches, often set in a recognizable, future Africa, with African lineages–that are not cultural hybrids but rooted in the history and traditions of the continent, without a desire to look toward Western culture.’ Okorafor’s need to assert the notion of Africa as an important site of Blackness in comics highlights the marginal standing of representations of Africa in discourses of global Blackness in comics, even in the contemporary era of diversity, inclusion, and equity. This article examines Okorafor’s Marvel comic Shuri to further elucidate Africanfuturism and consider the concept as a paradigm for approaching African comic content.
AB - Internationally renowned Nigerian-American sci-fi writer Nnedi Okorafor recently wrote that she no longer wants her work to be considered Afrofuturism, preferring her own term Africanfuturism. Okorafor argues that despite the potential for Afrofuturism to underscore global Blackness, in practice it has privileged African American concerns while marginalising those of Africa. Okorafor, whose work includes several comics including Black Panther, Shuri, and LaGuardia, argues that her work should be understood as explicitly African rather than part of the Black diaspora. She puts this notion into practice by writing novels and comics set in Africa with African characters ‘sometimes with aliens, sometimes with witches, often set in a recognizable, future Africa, with African lineages–that are not cultural hybrids but rooted in the history and traditions of the continent, without a desire to look toward Western culture.’ Okorafor’s need to assert the notion of Africa as an important site of Blackness in comics highlights the marginal standing of representations of Africa in discourses of global Blackness in comics, even in the contemporary era of diversity, inclusion, and equity. This article examines Okorafor’s Marvel comic Shuri to further elucidate Africanfuturism and consider the concept as a paradigm for approaching African comic content.
KW - Africa
KW - Africanfuturism
KW - Afrofuturism
KW - Okorafor
KW - Shuri
KW - black panther
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85113861736&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85113861736&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1080/21504857.2021.1965637
DO - 10.1080/21504857.2021.1965637
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85113861736
SN - 2150-4857
VL - 13
SP - 606
EP - 619
JO - Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics
JF - Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics
IS - 4
ER -