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- Bollobás, Enikő, et al.
(författare)
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International Scholarship
- 2016
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Ingår i: American Literary Scholarship. - Durham, USA : Duke University Press. - 0065-9142 .- 1527-2125. ; 2014:1, s. 415-494
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Forskningsöversikt (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)
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- Bonnevier, Jenny, 1974-
(författare)
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A Re-enchantment of Science Fiction? Reading Okorafor's Work in an Animist Tradition
- 2022
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Okorafor’s term Africanfuturism has been picked up by many in the speculative fiction communities and discussions about the term have often focused on what it has to say about the limits and possibilities of Afrofuturism as a category or social movement. In this paper, I instead center the animist tradition which is part of the “African culture, history, mythology and point-of-view” in which “Africanfuturism is specifically and more directly rooted” (Africanfuturism Defined | Nnedi's Wahala Zone Blog). I do so through Harry Garuba’s argument in “Explorations in Animist Materialism: Notes on Reading/Writing African Literature, Culture, and Society” that a “re-enchantment” is occurring in African cultures where “the rational and scientific are appropriated and transformed into the mystical and magical” (267). This process “subverts the authority of Western science by reinscribing the authority of magic within the interstices of the rational/secular/modern” (271). Given how traditional histories of science fiction carve out a specific science fiction identity through inextricably linking the genre with this “Western science,” an Africanfuturism that draws on animist traditions, I argue, does more than simply incorporate fantasy elements. Rather, as I will explore in my readings, it challenges us to rethink the relation between the rational and the magical, between science and myth. In this way, it asks us to again rethink the stories we tell about progress and modernity, especially as these continue to underpin science fiction as a genre. A focus on animist logics also provides alternative ways of framing materialism that resonate with current theories in posthumanism and feminist materialism, but which cannot be subsumed by them. In this way, too, Okorafor’s work challenges Western genealogies of rational thought. My reading will focus on the Binti trilogy, but also engage with The Book of Phoenix and Remote Control. Works citedGaruba, Harry. “Explorations in Animist Materialism: Notes on Reading/Writing African Literature, Culture, and Society.” Public Culture, vol.15, no. 2, 2003, pp.261-285.
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- Bonnevier, Jenny, 1974-
(författare)
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Embodying the "Undoing of the Human" : Nnedi Okorafor's Binti, Feminist Transspecies Kinship and a Livable Future
- 2022
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Imagining livable futures as means of survival is a project with long traditions among feminists, indigenous peoples, and people of color, as well as among the LGBTQIA communities. Central to these projects in all their irreducible difference is a concern with embodiment and the networks of connectedness in which our bodies exist. In the time of an ongoing mass extinction, the importance of non-human animals in such networks is increasingly recognized. A particularly rich text for an exploration of such livable futures is Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti trilogy, set in a future where humanity and kinship, as well as marginality, have been radically rethought.As Rosi Braidotti notes in “A Theoretical Framework for the Critical Posthumanities” where she takes a “materialist approach” to “inscribe the Anthropocene as a multi-layered posthuman predicament,” the varying genealogies of posthumanism include “affective… dimensions of our ecologies of belonging (Guattari, 2000)” (32). Situating the discussion in the wide field of posthumanism and drawing on feminist materialist and science fictional traditions of critique as well as feminist critical kinship studies, in this paper I argue that a focus on transspecies kinship can help us pay attention to the specificities of embodied experiences of posthuman conditions in ways that can help us construct livable futures. This focus includes Haraway’s “being-with” of companion species as well as contrasting formulations of kinship, such as Latimer’s “alongsideness.” While based within the framework Braidotti outlines, the argument takes as its impetus a need to explore the material, embodied experiences of the posthuman subject at the very point where Braidotti frames “the posthuman… less as a substantive entity than a… conceptual persona. …that aims at achieving adequate understanding of these processes of undoing the human” (34). Exploring “undoing the human” as it is narrativized in Okorafor’s Binti trilogy as a material process involving bodily matter as well as lived and embodied kinship relations, my reading will pay attention both to the pain and loss involved in this posthuman undoing and to the rich sites of hope constructed in the process. To construct livable futures, I argue, it is such complex sites of loss and hope that we must inhabit. As other critics have explored, Okorafor’s work draws on African animist traditions and is rightly recognized as one example of the richness of African speculative fiction. Reading her Binti trilogy as an exploration of the posthuman subject, discursively embodied and consistently moving and becoming in and through transspecies kinship relations, means insisting on genealogies of the posthuman that refuses ideas of Euro-American primacy in the field and insists on both posthuman subjects and transspecies kinship as themselves having long, diverse, and revolutionary histories, as well as potentially rich futures.
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| 8. |
- Bonnevier, Jenny, 1974-
(författare)
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Estranging Cognition : Feminist Science Fiction and the Borders of Reason
- 2005
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This study explores the intersections of three different fields: feminism, science fiction, and epistemology. It argues that as a genre, science fiction is dependent on epistemological discourses that have their roots in the stories and self-images of modern science. Furthermore, it is argued, these discourses are gendered and operate to reinforce patriarchal assumptions about gender and knowledge. Drawing on a tradition of feminist epistemology, works by Suzy McKee Charnas, Ursula Le Guin, and Joanna Russ are analyzed as engaging with and challenging these epistemologically loaded and fundamentally gendered discourses in different ways and in varying degrees.The study can be divided into two parts. Chapters one and two examine discourses on science fiction history and identity in the context of the origin stories of science, highlighting the links between reason, progress, authority and gender. They establish the traditional maleness of “reason” and its implications in the idea(l)s of progress, as they appear both in the texts of epistemology and in the texts of science fiction. Texts by Charnas, Le Guin, and Russ are read as challenges to ideologies of reason and progress, and thereby as reinscribing generic conventions as well as displacing traditional epistemological assumptions.Critically interrogating the traditional subject of knowledge, chapters three and four read the fiction of Charnas, Le Guin, and Russ as displacing this subject and exploring alternative understandings. The mainstream/malestream epistemological idea(l) of “a view-from-nowhere” is connected to the science fiction convention of “the-idea-as-hero,” and both are critiqued as significantly gendered concepts that serve to obfuscate the social and political dimensions of the subject of knowledge. Finally, (female) experience, emotions, and the body – three areas commonly designated as beyond the scope of epistemology proper – are explored as epistemic resources rather than liabilities.
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- Bonnevier, Jenny, 1974-
(författare)
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“I live the City” : Emerging Radical Kinship Connections in N.K. Jemisin’s The City We Became
- 2023
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- N.K. Jemisin has come to be regarded as an important voice in Afrofuturism, in particular in light of the impact of her Broken Earth trilogy (2015-2017). While she explains that the term “has always been something that other people applied to me and my work, not something I ever used or even fully understood” (Lavender and Yaszek 2020, 26), her stories unquestionably exemplify the challenge Afrofuturism constitutes to narrative traditions in speculative fiction that tell the stories of a small fraction of humanity as if they were everybody’s story. In The City We Became (2020), this challenge is narratively situated in New York City and articulated through the emergence of the city as sentient, in the multiple form of seven avatars. Drawing on material feminist understandings of matter and agency, this paper will explore how kinship can serve as a framework to help conceptualize the processes of entanglement that characterize the emergence of the avatars in The City We Became and that challenge hierarchical, exclusionary practices that value purity or homogeneity. Race and ethnicity, as well as gender and sexuality, are central to the relationships formed between the avatars in the novel, both through creating spaces of connectedness and as driving suspicion and resistance. These avatars also bring their pre-existing kinship connections into the emerging formation, thus creating intimate proximities between patterns of connectedness that are culturally distinct yet geographically co-existent. This is of course a function of the city, often read as problematic, but it also brings into focus the ongoing pathologizing of kinship structures that do not conform with white hegemonic ideals of nuclear families. For this reason, the reading proposed here brings into theoretical proximity understandings of kinship proposed for instance by Sarah Franklin, Donna Haraway, and Anna Tsing that could loosely be called posthuman or more-than-human, and Black feminist thought on family and reproduction by, for instance, Candice M. Jenkins and Susana M. Morris that explores kinship formations as inevitably shaped by the transatlantic slave trade and the institution of slavery. Work Cited:Lavender, Isiah III and Lisa Yaszek, eds. Literary Afrofuturism in the twenty-first century. The Ohio State UP, 2020.
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