Unfamiliar families and disturbing climate futures

ABSTRACT

Ecomaternalism remains the dominant narrative concerning the role of families in climate politics. The centrality of ecomaternalist narratives to intersectional constructions of race, gender, heteronormativity, and nature means that interrogating and disrupting these dominant representations of families is a crucial task of ecofeminist, postcolonial, and queer political theory. This article explores other ways to narrate familial politics that might challenge rather than reproduce dominant power relations. Examining three Africanfuturist short stories by Nnedi Okorafor (“Spider the Artist”), Tlotlo Tsamaase (“Virtual Snapshots”), and Terh Agbedeh (“Mango Republic”), set in Nigeria and Botswana, I argue that they draw our attention to transformations within cyborg, digitized, and utopian families and social structures, as well as the potential for violence within the heteronormative patriarchal family. They narrate alternative discourses about families in crisis, families as threat, and families as ruination that are rarely articulated in climate politics. In these stories, the family is not the solution to climate politics, but a social relation that will (and should) change as the climatic and social context changes.

KEYWORDS:

• Climate change
• ecomaternalism
• Africanfuturism
• fiction
• Africa

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to Sherilyn MacGregor, Martin Coward, Gediminas Lesutis, and Aoileann Ní Mhurchú who read drafts and offered innumerable generous and insightful comments and suggestions. The current version owes a great deal to their input, though of course any errors and all limitations remain my own. The journal’s reviewers and editors also strengthened the article through their feedback. Lastly, I would like to acknowledge my family – in the broadest sense – whose love and care inspired, disrupted, and shaped this article in manifold ways.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 The artwork by Rebekka Dunlap and Ibrahim Ganiyu accompanying “Virtual Snapshots” and “Mango Republic” also indicates the prominence of pregnancy in these stories. For the former, see Tsamaase (2016).

2 Both “Spider the Artist” and “Virtual Snapshots” are freely accessible online, on North American websites. “Mango Republic” was published by Dada Books in an anthology, Lagos_2060: Exciting Sci-Fi Stories from Nigeria.

3 This section focuses on research on African literature rather than on the far wider and more extensive discussions of motherhood in African-American literature (see for example Duncan 2005; Frazier 2016; Haraway 2016; Jackson 2020; Kaplan 1992).

4 See also Flora Nwapa’s Efuru for a critical portrayal of motherhood and motherlessness, in the first novel published in English by an African woman (Nwapa 1966). The final lines are the source of the title for Emecheta’s novel (Wright 2010, 136). Thank you to Reviewer 2 for pointing this out.

5 For these reasons as well as others explored more fully in works by Krishnan (2014), Nfah-Abbenyi (1997), Rico (2017), and Stephanie Newell (1997), there is a history of tensions and heated debates between African feminists, womanists, theorists, artists, and intellectuals, and various branches of the so-called “Western feminist” tradition.

6 A paradigmatic example of the “exotic Africa” trope is the short story collection Future Earths: Under African Skies (Resnick and Dozois 1993), whose jacket cover blurb invites readers to “[e]xplore Africa the day after tomorrow in these poignant and provocative stories by science fiction’s finest talents … [H]ere are fifteen expeditions into possible futures amid cultures fully as alien as any of extraterrestrial origin.”

7 Thank you to Reviewer 1 for urging me to read this.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Carl Death

Carl Death is a Senior Lecturer in International Political Economy at the University of Manchester, UK. His books include The Green State in Africa (Yale University Press, 2016), Critical Environmental Politics (Routledge, 2013), and Governing Sustainable Development (Routledge, 2010). He is currently working on a book on African climate futures as envisioned in policy strategies and climate fiction.