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.
2022.
Africanfuturism, posthumanism, feminist materialism, transpecies kinship, Nnedi Okorafor, Binti