Nigerian Speculative Fiction : The Evolution

This book is an exciting addition to a gap in non-Western genre studies of African fiction. It challenges the dominant canonicity of African literature, overshadowed by texts concerned with the colonial discourse and ‘writing back’ while exploring speculative themes in Nigerian fiction and writings that stem from an African cosmology and culture.

The book examines important twentieth-century precursors of the post-millennial ‘boom’ in Nigerian Speculative Fiction (SF), reading texts that were omitted from the Nigerian literary canon developed in the 1960s. It combines of the analysis of recent fiction and criticism with a historical overview of the development of the under-researched area of Nigerian SF. Through these readings, the author demonstrates the range of concerns explored by Nigerian SF including futurism, posthumanism, horror, fantasy and science fiction, among others. This book argues that these narratives exceed the binary implicitly sustained by the texts that write back to the West and offers new readings of contemporary Nigerian SF; works that imagine futures different to the past and present conditions imposed by capitalism, colonialism and imperialism.

Providing new theoretical tools and concepts, this book in the Studies in Global Genre Fiction series will be of interest to readers and scholars working in the fields of African studies, African culture and society, literature and language, interdisciplinary literary studies, area studies, literary criticism and genre studies.