Speculating on an Afrofuturist Anthropocene

Abstract

This thesis proposes a theoretical alliance made up of three parts to the end of furthering the thinking on genre flailing and estrangement in an Anthropocene context. It advocates a combination of Afrofuturist science fiction studies, ecocritical literary studies, and new formalism, and sees in this threefold perspective a productive way to explain what estrangement can do in speculative and critical literature about environmental destruction. It seeks to re-emphasize the political potential of Afrofuturist engagements with a changing climate, not only to apprehend the structural workings of racialized climate suffering, but also to provide a template of entangled human adaptation to environmental and social change.