Africanfuturism’s speculation of the “digital” initiates a shift in what it means to think and enter techno-digitally enhanced planetary futures. I call this speculation the “Afridigital,” which I argue discloses the following: at a moment when the digital is being conceived as a building block in proposed solutions to ecological crises, identity sets the terms within which the digital contributes to Earth’s capacity for life. So far, the conjoined nature of Euro-American identity and rationality dominates how the digital is conceptualized in relation to the planetary—for example, as a technique of representation that can quantify and technologically enable life amidst transgressed planetary boundaries. The Afridigital, however, is a technique of life, one that facilitates literal and figurative acts of circulation and fecundity, coinciding with the pluralism and becoming of African cultures and spirituality.
This essay sketches the Afridigital and concludes by offering a learning point for the West’s consideration, namely, how to depart from the identity ideology that undermines democratic and environmental futures. Key to Africanfuturism is the decentralization of the West from African critical and creative thought. Importantly, then, my learning point is not actively offered to the West by Africanfuturism itself; it only comes to the fore if the Western thinker accepts and reflects on her decentered position by listening to Africanfuturist perspectives. More than a subgenre of speculative fiction, Africanfuturism articulates human emancipation from colonial race relations that have coagulated into perceived foundational categories of identity and being. Political theorist Achille Mbembe describes this emancipation as “a prerequisite” for reinventing and repairing Earth and human relations, which the Afridigital helps facilitate.1
Before offering an example of the Afridigital, I pause on the notion of “circulation” as both a characteristic of the Afridigital and as an Africanfuturist motif. The Afridigital is not necessarily interested in computing, devices, or platforms as tools to diversify the global techno-digital monoculture. Instead, it describes a technique of circulation or mobility and a faculty for transformation that scholars note has always been African. For example, Mbembe claims that Africa is so deeply rooted in forms of circulation that “Africa was digital before the digital,” by which he means that Africa takes on the spirit of the digital, its “flexibility, adaptability, and aptitude for constant innovation, for the extension of the possible.”2 Circulation is a manifestation of the spirit of the digital that extends the possible both physically, by way of movement, and abstractly, by way of transcendence. In Nnedi Okorafor’s definition of Africanfuturism as a political and creative movement, Okorafor’s focus on “African culture, history, mythology and point-of-view” and “the Black Diaspora” suggests that Africanfuturism itself describes a mode of circulation through time, space, and belief. In this sense, Africanfuturism is that which, in the words of Janelle Rodriques, “does not concern itself with writing back” to the (neo)colonial empire, but instead, writes itself in,” decentering the West by transcending geographies of post/colonial centers and peripheries.3 A movement beyond identity ideology consequently ensues.
If Africanfuturist perspectives do not write back, then they extract Africa from the normative discourse of identity ideology based on diametrical race relations, facilitating an exploration of uniquely African subjectivities beyond the striations of colonizer/colonized and colonized/post-colonial. Such turning inwards is an act of innovation that Souleymane Bachir Diagne evokes at the individual scale when he states that the task of every African is to ensure that “the possible marches in advance of the real, illuminates it, and draws it forward.”4 The task, in other words, is to prioritize the circulation and dialoguing of present and future so as to always establish new horizons.
Recent African speculative fiction takes up Diagne’s task through the Afridigital, using techno-digital methods to illuminate subjectivities that move towards a planetary consciousness. Nigerian, Brooklyn-based visual artist Olalekan Jeyifous’s 2020 digital art series, “The Frozen Neighborhoods” (TFN), shows the Afridigital at work through virtual reality (VR) headsets, which are featured throughout the series’ images as a way in which TNF’s inhabitants circulate within a world of limited mobility. TFN speculates a future, self-contained Brooklyn settlement of African diasporic communities in a United States where a “mobility credit” system has been implemented that renders vehicular travel finite. Each person receives a limited amount of mobility credits, which allows them to legally travel. Once credits are spent (or sold), an individual is “frozen” in space, unable to journey beyond her neighborhood.
One TFN image, titled “TFN – MTA: A/C/E DOCK 4, Gateway Line” (DOCK 4), shows a metro platform turned virtual kiosk that acts as a departure point for an extension into the possible. Here, people rent out VR headsets, through which they travel the world and complete education and workforce programs. Some of these immobile travelers gesticulate with mouths open in mid-conversation, suggesting that the headsets offer immersive experiences of exploration through which travelers enter new subjectivities, particularly as contributors to their community. TFN’s communities survive in their frozen state by developing commons-based, sustainable practices, such as urban agriculture cooperatives and seed collectives.If immobile travelers use their newfound knowledge to contribute to neighborhood flourishing, then digital circulation contributes to the circulation of material life, as suggested by the vegetation that lines the edges of the virtual kiosk in “DOCK 4” and by images such as “Plant Seeds, Grow Blessings,” which features a busy, interfaith seed market through which the odd immobile traveler sits or passes, headset on.
Importantly, TFN does not portray communities’ limited mobility as a form of imprisonment or critique of mobility injustice. TFN inhabitants’ adaptation to life prevails over and transcends mechanisms of power through the digital nature of Africanfuturist subjectivity. Insofar as the immobile travelers contribute to their community, they bring the African-centric possible into the present, as suggested by the African masks that line the walls of a dock control room in another image, “East New York Substation.” In TFN, the Afridigital builds an earthly community that is ‘earthly’ because it is beyond identity norms.
Identity conditions the digital: this is what the West can realize if it listens to African speculative fiction. Africanfuturism’s leave-taking of identity can catalyze the Western reader to take stock of Western identity myths and the impasse these concoct: while the digital offers possibilities to continue life on Earth amidst ecological crises, these possibilities cannot be realized under the ideology of identity, which has recently extended into AI discourse. Claims that the digital might somehow link, for example, “the acceleration of complex intelligence to the stabilization of its planetary foundations” need to include dismantling the sovereignty of Western definitions of intelligence in AI development to move towards “diversification as order.”5 A planetary future in which a planetary society and its digital technologies are conducive to responding to change without continuing forms of violence requires a new articulation of human identity, one that stands separate from the legacy of colonial mythology and that germinates through the active construction of a common world.
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Endnotes
- Achille Mbembe, Brutalism, trans. Steven Corcoran (Duke University Press, 2024), 149.
- Achille Mbembe, Brutalism, 52.
- Janelle Rodriques, “‘Being Very Human in One of the Most Inhuman Cities in the World’: Lagos as a Site of Africanfuturist Invasion in Lagoon and Godhunter,” Speculative and Science Fiction: African Literature Today 39, edited by Louisa Uchum Egbunike and Chimalum Nwankwo (James Currey, 2021), 17.
- Souleymane Bachir Diagne, “From Thinking Identity to Thinking African Becomings,” The Politics of Time: Imagining African Becomings, edited by Achille Mbembe and Felwine Sarr, translated by Philip Gerard (Polity Press, 2023), 8.
- Benjamin Bratton, “Planetary Sapience,” The Planetary, edited by Nils Gilman (Berggruen Press, 2025), 44.
Pamela Carralero