The Middle Passage Refigured : African Migration in Science Fiction

The history of speculative fiction in Africa is troubled and fragmented, amounting to bits and pieces of a still unresolved puzzle. Once considered derivative, secondary, and marginal, science fiction and its sister genres (fantasy, magic realism, weird, new weird, horror, and so on) have produced to date a huge repertoire of stories that opportunely speculate on a number of urgent issues in African cultures and experiences, migration among them. The journey as a guiding formula, which “scifi” so often invests in, routinely pops up in. narratives accounting not only for the nomadic nature of many African traditions but also for the experience of forced dislocation, starting with the Middle Passage and continuing with today’s Mediterranean crossings.