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Girls Making Families: Agential Assemblage in Nnedi Okorafor’s Speculative Fiction
Örebro University, University Library.ORCID iD: 0000-0002-0126-5655
2023 (English)In: Populating the Future: Families and Reproduction in Speculative Fiction / [ed] Britt Johanne Farstad, Gävle, Sweden: Kriterium/Gävle University Press , 2023, p. 133-156Chapter in book (Refereed)
Abstract [en]

A girl or young woman facing new or dangerous challenges without the support of a family is a recurring motif in Nnedi Okorafor’s multiple award-winning fiction. Okorafor’s protagonists tend to reinvent traditional conceptions of families and create new family constellations through assemblage. These may include members of different human tribes, or even extraterrestrial, engineered or magical nonhuman creatures – and such assemblages are driven by the desire to find new ways of being in the world and relating to others. This chapter examines the kinmaking strategies of four of Okorafor’s protagonists to show how they form cross-culture and cross-species kinships. Binti, Onyesonwu, Phoenix, and Fatima/Sankofa all reinterpret traditions and create new families ranging beyond biological reproduction or kinship ties. To some extent, all the texts under discussion here could be classified as coming-of-age stories, in which assembled families complement and often replace biological families; the assembled families populating Okorafor’s texts are both vehicles of individual agency and utopian expressions of malleable traditions in an ecologically fragile world fraught with racial tension. Although agential assemblage through naming and storytelling has utopian implications in Who Fears Death (2010) and the Binti Trilogy (2015–18), assemblage is also central in the death and dying in The Book of Phoenix (2015) and Remote Control (2021). The assembled families populating Okorafor’s fiction are both vehicles of individual agency and utopian expressions of malleable traditions in an ecologically fragile world fraught with racial tension. Assemblage thus seems central to Okorafor’s utopian Africanfuturist impetus, and the chapter therefore concludes with a brief reflection on the role of narration in Okorafor’s agential assemblages. 

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Gävle, Sweden: Kriterium/Gävle University Press , 2023. p. 133-156
Keywords [en]
kinship, agency, assemblage theory, speculative fiction
National Category
Specific Literatures General Literature Studies
Research subject
English
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:oru:diva-102564DOI: 10.59682/kriterium.52.fISBN: 9789189593060 (print)ISBN: 9789189593077 (electronic)OAI: oai:DiVA.org:oru-102564DiVA, id: diva2:1786897
Available from: 2023-08-10 Created: 2023-08-10 Last updated: 2024-03-18Bibliographically approved

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Grimbeek, Marinette

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CiteExportLink to record
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Citation style
  • apa
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Output format
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