Africanfuturist Socio‐Climatic Imaginaries and Nnedi Okorafor’s Wild Necropolitics

Abstract

Abstract: Dominant and insurgent socio‐climatic imaginaries struggle for influence over how the future is envisioned. Africanfuturist imaginaries have huge potential to unsettle racialised and gendered climate narratives. In this article I use Nnedi Okorafor’s novel Who Fears Death in order to challenge mainstream climate imaginaries and to imagine new forms of being and becoming in the context of climate change. Drawing on Achille Mbembe’s concepts of biopolitics and necropolitics, as well as black feminist traditions of imagining new genres of the human, I argue that Okorafor’s “wild necropolitics” illuminates how the forces of “wild nature” have become central features of the deployment of the means of destroying life, especially in the context of climate change. By examining the motifs of change, violence, wilderness and narration, I argue that reading and writing different stories about alternative climate futures is essential to the process of finding new ways of being and becoming human.