The production of science fiction on the African continent increased significantly during the 2000s, and was hailed as an emancipatory event of some magnitude. Okorafor (2009: 8) claims that SF has the potential to “change the world”, Hartmann (2012: 7) says it is “the only genre that enables African writers to envision a future from our African perspective”, and Ryman (2017: 3) is reminded of “Elizabethan England at the time of Shakespeare – the power is rising, and the literature with it”. Moreover, as the phenomenon initially emerged largely on the internet, thus circumventing the normative demands international publishers often impose on African cultural production, the form is thought to challenge representational inequality of the world-literary system.
There can be little doubt that contemporary African science fiction (ASF) has had an impact on African cultural production and its reception in non-African, predominantly Euro-American, contexts. This is evident from the large number of publications, the literary infrastructure that emerged alongside ASF, and the effectiveness of ASF authors’ interventions in public debates on African literature. But as I aim to show in this presentation, while ASF is considered a pan-African phenomenon, it predominantly relies on and consists of Anglophone works. Luso-African works, inter alia, are virtually absent from the debate. Paradoxically, then, it may be suggested that the ASF movement reproduces the structures of the world-literary system while aiming to correct them.
From this position, and through a discussion of two ASF cases—of the Mozambican author Carlos dos Santos and of the Egyptian writer Ahmed Khalid Towfik—I will argue that ASF both offers the opportunity to study the cross-national emergence of a literary form in the periphery of the world system and of the power dynamics at work, and highlights the considerable difficulties that the study of such phenomena offers. However, this intersection of difficulty and opportunity may provide us with a way to work though comparative literary analysis of contemporary phenomena.