Abstract
In much recent criticism and commentary, black British literature and culture has either been used to reflect and interrogate the state of the nation or, as an educational tool, to shine a light on hidden histories and the shadowy margins of the present. As a result, the work’s formal structures and particularly writers’ experiments with linguistic forms and textual or performative structures are often bypassed in favour of a realist or literalist approach to content. Focusing on Okojie’s novel, Butterfly Fish (2015) and her collection of short stories Speak Gigantular (2016), I argue that this work creates what Marie-Laure Ryan has defined as ‘impossible worlds’; fiction that demands ‘new strategies for making sense of the text’ (p. 369), and that tests habitual assumptions about black women’s fiction and the worlds their texts create. Okojie’s work produces instabilities; it settles on strangeness, reflecting what Tobias During (2017) describes as a startling ingenuity that presents the possibilities of different worlds and different geographies. Her fiction tests out new forms of contemporary prose and challenges readers to see worlds and words differently.
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Notes
- 1.
Concepts of Afrofuturism have emerged as a critical context within which black and primarily African-American cultural forms can be theorised. Recent developments of theoretical concepts of Afro-Futurism seek to foreground the speculative character of African-America sonic, visual and literary culture, focussing on the work’s collapsing of time and space and its preoccupation with futurist projections of the past (Lillvis 2017). In his introduction to an interview with poet and visual artist Krista Franklin, T.L. Andres (2014) locates Afro-Futurism in specifically American contexts of cultural production and criticism. In other areas of African diaspora and continental African scholarship, however, the term has been treated with some scepticism (Bristow 2014). Krista Franklin emphasises an important intersection between ‘the lives of people of color, and technology, science, science fiction’ (https://www.berlilnartlink.com/2016/06/21/futures-afrofuturism-an-interiew-with-krista-franklin/ (Last accessed 01 June 2020).
- 2.
See, for example, Smith (2009). In an interview with Lisa Allerdice, Diana Evans, repeating sentiments expressed when describing the otherworldly quality of her writing and in particular characters who are ‘lost … emotionally off the A-Z’, says, “I seem to need some other dimension … normal reality doesn’t feel enough’ The Guardian 10 March 2018. (https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/mar/19/diana-evans-interview-ordinary-people accessed 13 September 2019). Leone Ross has said that she uses her writing to get into ‘strange, dark corners’ (Leone Ross TEDx 16 June 2011 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3MsWj8UigU last accessed 13 September 2019).
- 3.
James, D. (2013). ‘Wounded Realism’, Contemporary Literature. 51:1, pp. 204–14.
- 4.
Irenosen Okojie in conversation with Tobias During, BritLitFest, Berlin 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTg-AsuctsM accessed 13 September 2019.
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Scafe, S. (2021). ‘Daring to Tilt Worlds’: The Fiction of Irenosen Okojie. In: Aughterson, K., Philips, D. (eds) Women Writers and Experimental Narratives. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49651-7_14
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