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ABSTRACT
This article contends that Nnedi Okorafor remakes a European Enlightenment notion of mathematics in her speculative trilogy Binti (2015-2018). The titular character has the power of mathematical thinking, where through the contemplation of mathematical signs, she absents herself from her immediate physical surroundings and enters into a dream-like space. Reading Binti alongside Descartes’ Discourse on the Method, I argue that Okorafor draws on an Enlightenment notion of mathematics as training in reason, where it was believed that through the encounter with mathematical objects, man could learn to think independently of their cultural and religious backgrounds, becoming universal. Her critique of Enlightenment math is not explicit, but rather raises philosophical questions about what exactly math is and how it could have secured the secular human. Binti reveals that math is a linguistic technology for producing imaginative realms detached from the real world that could allow for different experiences of becoming. Okorafor’s work brings mathematics in conversation with literature and also Fanon’s thinking about race and the body. This essay examines how African speculative fiction can intervene in modern liberal notions of the human by interrogating and remaking the seemingly objective discourses that make up our current hegemonic mode of being human.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Nnedi Okorafor, Binti (New York: Tor, 2015), p. 28.
2 Ibid., pp. 28–9.
3 Mark Dery, ‘Black to the Future Interviews with Samuel R. Delany, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose’, in The Discourse of Cyberculture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012).
4 On her relationship to science fiction, Okorafor has noted that she felt she could not relate to the themes and preoccupations of Anglo-European science fiction, and it was rather the prospect of speculation – imagination removed from reality, the posing of the question ‘What if?’ – that catalysed her interest in writing, as well as the desire to center her own and other African diasporic perspectives. Okorafor’s writing, in other words, is shaped by multiple commitments and traditions. (See Nnedi Okorafor, ‘Sci-Fi Stories that Imagine a Future Africa’ (August 2017). https://www.ted.com/talks/nnedi_okorafor_sci_fi_stories_that_imagine_a_future_africa/transcript/. ‘Science Fiction […] is all About the Question, “What If?”’.)
5 Hugh O’Connell argues that Okorafor presents a corrective vision of Lagos in Lagoon against mainstream representations of Nigeria in District 9 and as a site of potential and futurity. Others have explored how Okorafor uses the relaxed mimetic constraints of speculative fiction to re-imagine place, from the imagination of a post-apocalyptic Africa that is also free of neoliberalism in her early novels (Joshua Yu Burnett), to the utopian, cosmopolitan spaces of Lagoon and Binti (Dustin Crowley). Melody Sue extends these studies of Okorafor’s treatment of place to her work with the natural environment, arguing that Okorafor’s representations of aliens in Lagoon as coral reefs and with Mami Wata devices blends indigenous cosmologies and technological development.
6 Nnedi Okorafor, ‘Nnedi Okorafor Finds Inspiration Everywhere – Including Jellyfish: An Interview’, Wired Book Club (Feb. 17, 2017). https://www.wired.com/2017/02/wired-book-club-nnedi-okorafor-interview/.
7 Alondra Nelson, ‘Introduction: Future Texts’, Social Text 20.2 (2002), pp. 1–15.
8 Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Dunham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), p. 3.
9 Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Becoming Human (New York: New York University Press, 2020), p. 19.
10 Ibid., p. 4.
11 Pierre Remond de Montmort to Nicolas Bernoulli in 1713. Quoted in Jeanne Peiffer, ‘France’, in Joseph W. Dauben and Christoph J. Scriba (eds), Writing the History of Mathematics: Its Historical Development (Basel: Springer, 2002).
12 Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), pp. 23–5.
13 Sylvia Wynter, ‘Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation – an Argument’, CR: The New Centennial Review 3.3 (2003), p. 264.
14 Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), p. 267. Adas traces the part that mathematics played in consolidating the metropolitan subject as superior and in possession of the right to rule.
15 By ‘Greco-European praxis’, I refer to a still-hegemonic conception of mathematics understood to emerge in the Enlightenment through a rereading of Greek texts, where mathematics is abstract and deductive, and an intellectual activity that separates primitive from modern being. For more on the Eurocentric history of mathematics, see George Gheverghese Joseph, The Crest of the Peacock: Non-European Roots of Mathematics (Third Edition) (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011).
16 There is a common tendency to associate mathematical results from metropolitan women and colonial subjects as the result of rote computation rather than of human thought. For accounts of the gendered recognition of mathematical ability, see Sara Hottinger, Inventing the Mathematician Gender, Race, and Our Cultural Understanding of Mathematics (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2016), and Claire Jones, Femininity, Mathematics and Science, 1880–1914 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). More recently a study showed that of those fields where activity/training is thought to take place in the mind (music, philosophy) as opposed to in institutional spaces (laboratory sciences, engineering), male white students are often identified as the bearers of the invisible ability. See Sarah-Jane Leslie, Andrei Cimpian, Meredith Meyer, and Edward Freeland, ‘Expectations of Brilliance Underlie Gender Distributions Across Academic Disciplines’, Science 347.6219 (2015), pp. 262–5.
17 Nalo Hopkinson and Uppinder Mehan, So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Visions of the Future (Vancouver, BC: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2004), p. 10.
18 Moradewun Adejunmobi, ‘Introduction: African Science Fiction’, Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 3.3 (2016), pp. 265–72.
19 For this argument, see Mary Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2010).
20 For the uses of mathematics in colonialism, see Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010) and Bruno Latour, ‘Visualisation and Cognition: Drawing Things Together’, AVANT: Trends in Interdisciplinary Studies 3 (2012), pp. 207–60.
21 While Okorafor depicts the Himba as a patriarchal society, the social organisation of the Himba is complex and they practice dual descent (See Narmala Halstead, Eric Hirsch, and Judith Okely, Knowing How to Know: Fieldwork and the Ethnographic Present (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008)). Okorafor’s depictions are perhaps more accurately read as a kind of ‘imagining with’ Himba people given popular representations of the Himba as traditional/isolated society and through Okorafor’s own positionality as a Nigerian-American writer, rather than as an accurate sociological or historical account of Himba communities.
22 Okorafor’s secondary school education in Illinois explains why Binti’s equations are recognisable within a Western history of mathematics: v – e + f = 2; a^2 + b^2 = c^2; e^{i × π} + 1 = 0; z = z^2 + c are respectively the equations of Euler, Pythagoras, and Mandelbrot.
23 Okorafor, Binti, p. 32.
24 Ibid., p. 62.
25 Okorafor, ‘Nnedi Okorafor Finds Inspiration Everywhere’.
26 The mathematician Rueben Hersh writes in a study of narrative accounts of mathematical experience that ‘[w]hat some mathematicians say they are doing’ includes finding their way through a ‘labyrinth’, ‘landscape’, or ‘geography of mathematical reality.’ ‘There is no “furniture” or “labyrinth” in any literal sense … [they] are encountering mental mathematical entities. These mental mathematical entities are experienced as actual objects, more or less clearly or obscurely perceived, that have their own properties, which the mathematician may struggle for a long time to ascertain.’ Reuben Hersh, Experiencing Mathematics: What Do We Do, When We Do Mathematics? (Providence, RI: American Mathematical Society, 2013), pp. 92–5.
27 Brian Rotman, Mathematics as Sign: Writing, Imagining, Counting (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000).
28 C.P. Snow, ‘The Two Cultures’, New Statesman (1956).
29 Okorafor, Binti, p. 41.
30 Okorafor, Binti: Home (New York: Tor, 2017), p. 130.
31 Ron Eglash, African Fractals: Modern Computing and Indigenous Design (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999).
32 Okorafor’s secondary school education in Illinois explains why Binti’s equations are recognisable within a Western history of mathematics: v – e + f = 2; a^2 + b^2 = c^2; e^{i × π} + 1 = 0; z = z^2 + c are respectively the equations of Euler, Pythagoras, and Mandelbrot.
33 Baylee Brits, Literary Infinities: Number and Narrative in Modern Fiction (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing USA, 2017).
34 Okorafor, Binti, pp. 32–3.
35 Fredric Jameson, ‘In Hyperspace’, London Review of Books 37.17 (2015), p. 17.
36 Nnedi Okorafor, Binti: The Night Masquerade (New York: Tor, 2018), p. 17.
37 Okorafor, Binti: Home, pp. 105–6.
38 Elsewhere, Binti describes practicing mathematical thinking with fellow travelers in her room in the spaceship because it ‘was the emptiest’, where the absence of solid things helps with the kind of abstract thinking that is required. Okorafor, Binti, p. 22.
39 Okorafor, Binti: Home, pp. 105–6.
40 John Bender and Michael Marrinan, The Culture of Diagram (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), p. 7. As historian of mathematics Reviel Netz elaborates, ‘The perceived diagram does not exhaust the geometrical object … But the properties of the perceived diagram from a true subset of the real properties of mathematical objects. This is why diagrams are good to think with.’
41 Okorafor, Binti: Home, p. 43.
42 Ibid., p. 86.
43 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), p. 3.
44 Ibid., p. 40. See also Edward W Soja, Thirdspace: A Journey Through Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), pp. 10, 22.
45 Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006). ‘Places and spaces are experienced subjectively, and interpretations of such discourses, locales and scales reflect this. Black women are not only defined according to white and patriarchal discourses, black cultural expectations, and class differences, they experience and interpret these cultural purveyors differently.’ McKittrick takes up this argument again in a reading of The Bluest Eye, writing that for black women ‘situated in places, communities and nations that deny comfortable and coherent lived experiences’, it is important to consider place in relation to multiple scales: ‘in their minds, in their bodies, in their homes, in urban/rural centers, and in the nation’. See ‘“Black and ‘Cause I’m Black I’m Blue”: Transverse Racial Geographies in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye’, Gender, Place and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography 7 (2000), pp. 125–42.
46 Okorafor, Binti, p. 29.
47 Matthew L. Jones, ‘Descartes’s Geometry as Spiritual Exercise’, Critical Inquiry 28.1 (2001), pp. 40–71.
48 Mary Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2010), pp. 16–17.
49 Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Things That Talk: Object Lessons from Art and Science (New York: Zone Books, 2004), p. 13.
50 By abstract objects, I do not mean objects that have come into being through the process of abstraction. That is, I am not making an etiological claim, and indeed Descartes would reject the Aristotelian view that math is a product of abstraction from empirical experience. I use ‘abstract objects’ to refer to objects for which thinking with the object does not involve a back-and-forth movement between the object and the physical world.
51 René Descartes and John Cottingham, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 120–1.
52 Jones, ‘Descartes’ Geometry’, p. 42.
53 ‘So I will run through [all the particulars] several times in a continuous motion of the imagination, simultaneously intuiting one relation and passing on the next, until I have learned to pass from the first to last so swiftly that no part is left to the memory, and I seem to intuit the whole thing at once.’ From Rules, cited in Jones, ‘Descartes’ Geometry’, p. 63.
54 Okorafor, Binti, p. 10.
55 Ibid., p. 16.
56 Frantz Fanon and Charles Lam Markmann, Black Skin, White Masks (London: Pluto, 1986), p. 111.
57 Okorafor, Binti, p. 16. Edans are objects usually used by Yoruba sorcerers, and this is an example of Okorafor linking European mathematics to African cultural traditions.
58 Of mathematical language, Rotman writes that ‘the Subject is never called upon to interpret any sign or message whose meaning is inseparable from the physical circumstances – temporal, spatial, cultural – of its utterance’. Rotman, Mathematics as Sign, p. 19.
59 I am thinking here of Jackson’s ‘Sense of Things’, in which Jackson makes a similar observation on Nalo Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring.
60 Rotman, Mathematics as Sign, p. 5.
61 Brian Rotman, Ad Infinitum: The Ghost in Turing’s Machine (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), p. 142.
62 Rotman, Mathematics as Sign, p. 15.
63 Mark B.N. Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media (Cambridge: MIT, 2006), p. 10.
64 Okorafor, Binti: The Night Masquerade, p. 82.
65 Ibid., pp. 134–8.
66 Hidden or frozen mathematics refers to mathematical knowledge that may be reconstructed through mathematical thinking that is ‘hidden’ or ‘frozen’ in practices, e.g. basketmaking, braiding, art, and design (see Paulus Gerdes, Ethnomathematics and education in Africa (Stockholm: Stockholms Universitet, 1995), and Paulus Gerdes, Geometry from Africa: Mathematical and educational explorations (Washington, DC: Mathematical Association of America, 1999)). See for example the work of Claudia Zaslavsky on mathematical thinking from the African continent that appears within games, music, and accounting, and Ron Eglash on fractal patterns as implicit and explicit knowledge within African architecture and design. (Claudia Zaslavsky, Africa Counts: Number and Pattern in African Cultures (Chicago, IL: Lawrence Hill Books, 1999). Ron Eglash, African Fractals: Modern Computing and Indigenous Design (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999).)
67 Lorraine Daston, ‘On Scientific Observation’, Isis 99.1 (2008), pp. 97–110.
68 Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Zone Books, 1991).