To Örebro University

oru.seÖrebro University Publications
Change search
CiteExportLink to record
Permanent link

Direct link
Cite
Citation style
  • apa
  • ieee
  • modern-language-association-8th-edition
  • vancouver
  • Other style
More styles
Language
  • de-DE
  • en-GB
  • en-US
  • fi-FI
  • nn-NO
  • nn-NB
  • sv-SE
  • Other locale
More languages
Output format
  • html
  • text
  • asciidoc
  • rtf
“I live the City”: Emerging Radical Kinship Connections in N.K. Jemisin’s The City We Became
Örebro University, School of Humanities, Education and Social Sciences. (Sustainability Centered Humanities)ORCID iD: 0000-0002-4514-7028
2023 (English)Conference paper, Oral presentation only (Refereed)
Abstract [en]

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. 

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
2023.
Keywords [en]
speculative fiction, Afrofuturism, material feminism, kinship, N.K. Jemisin, posthumanism
National Category
General Literature Studies
Research subject
English
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:oru:diva-109704OAI: oai:DiVA.org:oru-109704DiVA, id: diva2:1811472
Conference
44th International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, Afrofuturism (ICFA 44), Orlando, FL., USA, March 15-18, 2023
Projects
Transspecies Kinship and Hominid Ecologies: Imagining Livable Worlds in a (Post)Apocalyptic PresentAvailable from: 2023-11-13 Created: 2023-11-13 Last updated: 2023-11-14Bibliographically approved

Open Access in DiVA

No full text in DiVA

Authority records

Bonnevier, Jenny

Search in DiVA

By author/editor
Bonnevier, Jenny
By organisation
School of Humanities, Education and Social Sciences
General Literature Studies

Search outside of DiVA

GoogleGoogle Scholar

urn-nbn

Altmetric score

urn-nbn
Total: 77 hits
CiteExportLink to record
Permanent link

Direct link
Cite
Citation style
  • apa
  • ieee
  • modern-language-association-8th-edition
  • vancouver
  • Other style
More styles
Language
  • de-DE
  • en-GB
  • en-US
  • fi-FI
  • nn-NO
  • nn-NB
  • sv-SE
  • Other locale
More languages
Output format
  • html
  • text
  • asciidoc
  • rtf