“We are change”: The Novum as Event in Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon

• Published in: Cambridge journal of postcolonial literary inquiry 2016-09, Vol.3 (3), p.291-312
• Main Author: O’Connell, Hugh Charles
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: African American literature; American literature; British & Irish literature; Business; English literature; Ideology; Motion pictures; Narratives; Neocolonialism; Neoliberalism; Novels; Okorafor, Nnedi; Postcolonialism; Rhetorical figures; Science fiction & fantasy; Subjectivity; Wells, H G (1866-1946)
• ISSN: 2052-2614; 2052-2622
• DOI: 10.1017/pli.2016.24

Nnedi Okorafor is a member of a growing vanguard of global SF/F authors who challenge the hegemony of SF as a purely Western genre. This decentering of SF foremost demands a critical engagement with its dominant, operative tropes. In this light, Lagoon subverts the stock colonial ideology long associated with the first contact alien invasion narrative. Drawing on Afrofuturist criticism, this essay argues that Lagoon utilizes the figure of the alien in order to examine Nigeria as both an object of the neoliberal futures industry and a progenitor of radical anti-neoimperial futurity. Rather than merely incorporating the predominantly Americentric determinations of much Afrofuturist thought wholesale, however, the novel demands a rethinking of the role of the alien from an African-utopian perspective. Ultimately, this requires a reconsideration of the work of the SF novum itself in line with Alain Badiou’s conception of the event, whereby the introduction of the SF novum of the alien can be seen as a placeholder for the unknowable, unforeseeable eruption of a radical, historical event: the reawakening of a seemingly structurally unrepresentable anticolonial subjectivity that is pitched against the ideological confines of the neoliberal present.