Third party funded individual grant
Start date : 01.07.2019
End date : 01.01.2024
Website: https://gepris.dfg.de/gepris/projekt/441611873?language=en
This project establishes a typology of African science fiction (SF) published between 2006 and 2018 from the perspective of African studies, science fiction scholarship, and comparative cultural studies. Its central aim is to investigate how the increasing involvement of global publishing during this period affected African SF formally, thematically, and medially. The pan-African and multilingual genre of African SF boomed during the 2006 to 2018 period, and scholars considered it a revolutionary mode of self-representation because it constituted a postcolonial rewriting of colonial SF, imagined alternative African futures, and because works were initially published independently. However, as the boom developed, international publishers and television networks including Marvel Comics, Disney Hyperion, and HBO increasingly appropriated African SF. To date, no studies exist that examine how this affected African SF. The central contribution of this project is to fill that gap, and provide insight into how African SF resisted or adapted to the demands of the global cultural marketplace, what hybrid forms emerged in this process, and what the consequences were for its alleged self-representational and emancipatory potential.This project follows three steps: 1) It establishes a working definition of African SF and a preliminary division of the boom in phases. 2) It determines a representative selection of African SF works and establishes a typology. Based on an initial analysis of form, theme, and medium of publication, up to five works of Portuguese, French, or English expression are selected for each phase. To establish the typology, the selection is subsequently analyzed in detail for the ideology of form, understood here as the symbolic message transmitted by the juxtaposition of multiple sign-systems. 3) It determines the trends and changes within the typology through comparative analysis of the different types, and correlates these with the heterogeneous demands of the global cultural marketplace as established in postcolonial scholarship.