To Örebro University

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.