Sitting with the Grief

Jenna N. Hanchey explores the recent anthology “Afro-Centered Futurisms in Our Speculative Fiction,” edited by Eugen Bacon.

By Jenna N. HancheyApril 24, 2025

• Cultural Studies

• SF

HOW CAN A GROUP as broad and deep and wide as African speculative fiction writers find a singular term that encompasses what all their collective pasts bring to their contemporary creative work, and the currents of feeling that may propel them toward better futures? There is no single answer to this question, surely. And certainly Afro-Centered Futurisms in Our Speculative Fiction (2014), edited by Eugen Bacon, does not settle on one—or even attempt to ease tensions between different positions. Instead, the collection contains a range of different perspectives within its 12 essays written by African SF writers, each of whom strive to find words that can describe the substance of their work and place it within context in a way that recognizes and reflects its worth.

Collection editor Eugen Bacon, for instance, notes that Afrofuturism is “a borrowed name”—taken from both the white writer who coined it, Mark Dery, as well as the context of Western Black speculative fiction it was designed to explain—and as such cannot necessarily capture African lived experience. For Aline-Mwezi Niyonsenga, in contrast, Afrofuturism creates “an opportunity to imagine an organized Black people reckoning with the past to determine how they’ll define their future” in a way that can encompass Africans within its fold as well. For other contributors, Africanfuturism is a more enabling term than Afrofuturism. Cheryl S. Ntumy in particular suggests that it serves “an important purpose in understanding the work of African writers,” yet some find the alternative label, created by Nigerian American writer Nnedi Okorafor, constraining. Tobi Ogundiran regards the discussion itself as “exhausting.” What might unify such diverse and disparate, yet intimately connected, visions of the future?

I find myself returning to one possible theme that connects these different perspectives: the idea that conveying the expansive possibilities of African-centered futures requires sitting with grief. I borrow the idea of “sitting with the grief” from Shingai Njeri Kagunda’s chapter in this volume; I find it resonant with what my colleague and friend Lore/tta LeMaster describes, in her essay “Suicidal,” as “sit[ting] in the ick.” For those who have had extraction and pain layered upon them over and over again by histories of colonialism, racism, and cisheterosexism, the resulting quagmire is not one to be simply fixed or escaped, but one that must be deeply reckoned with. Felt. Sat in.

Suyi Davies Okungbowa writes in the collection’s opening essay that each futurism extending from African ways of knowing sits with the past, present, and future simultaneously as it “engages with time and space as a conception of existence that is malleable and unbounded.” Nuzo Onoh thus describes Africanfuturism as a dualism: “the merging of the two worlds, the African past and the African reimagined future,” both enveloped within the emergent present. The future and the past are with us in the now. We are thus forced to reckon with the griefs that saturate our contexts: the continuing state and police violence against African and Black people, the continuing threats on trans and queer lives, the continuing genocide in Gaza. To construct futures with any hope of justice, we must engage with these griefs—with the feelings they create, which are so messy and goopy and difficult that they can only be called “ick.” We must sit with them, must feel how they permeate lives, must understand their sheer magnitude, if there is to be hope of creating futures that interrupt the circuit and disable the continuation of these horrifying conditions and the griefs they cause.

Afro-Centered Futurisms in Our Speculative Fiction attempts to sit with this grief. As Kagunda describes in her chapter, linear visions of the future based in progress narratives are visions “of production and consumption […] a refusal to take responsibility for the mass carnage a ‘dominated future’ has cost the earth, colonized, and enslaved people everywhere. It is an aversion to sitting with the grief.” As I have elsewhere written, dominant futures are predicated on ignoring the ghosts that colonialism creates, who continue to haunt our presents and futures. Futures centered on justice must turn and face them, talk to them, reckon with them. This reckoning, however, can assume as many forms as the people who undertake it. To that end, one of the strengths of the collection is that it does not try to smooth over the bumps and grooves. Rather, it provides myriad perspectives on what best enables African storytellers to do their work.

Each of the authors in the collection sits with the griefs of the past and present, with the countless forms those griefs take, in order to highlight how their own fiction helps to construct possibilities for African futures. Sitting with grief does not mean getting lost in it, but recognizing what grief has obscured—and what can be built from that recognition. Nerine Dorman writes that, “much as we can’t disentangle ourselves from the events of the past, if we attempt to erase them, we set ourselves up for repeating the mistakes of our forefathers.” Instead, she says, “we can choose to be nourished by that which is bitter.” In other words: part of sitting with the grief is also claiming joy, recognizing it as an intimate and inextricable part of life amidst devastation.

Many of the authors in the collection hold this tension. Kagunda, for example, foregrounds the vibrant potential of Black imagination. At the same time, she emphasizes the necessity to “completely overthrow systems that have equated our value to our labor” if there is any hope of escaping the “game of responding to the white patriarchal capitalist desire.” Similarly, Bacon looks for hope within dystopia as a form of “subversive activism” that calls readers to “enact and perhaps realize the new dreams and destinies of Mother Africa.”

While some turn to the future for hope, others look to ways the past can be revived. Dilman Dila, for instance, details how Yat Madit, a historical form of African governance, might be used as a model for direct democracies in the future. Xan van Rooyen also mines the past for resistance to contemporary colonial structures, reminding us how queerness has always been a part of African life. They argue that colonial ways of knowing must be completely overthrown to achieve the normalized queerness that African queers deserve: “[O]ne would need to eschew Western hegemony, decolonize current views of queerness within African societies, and consider a postgender future.” Their work compels us to consider: What might it look like for African storytelling to flourish not just beyond colonial griefs, but without reference to them entirely? If Africans did not have to labor to constantly delink from colonial logics in the publication process, reception of their work, and recognitions conferred on them, what kinds of futures could be written?

We’re not yet in that world. Yet this collection does offer some tentative antecedents, imagining possibilities of unbounded African life and ways of knowing. Ntumy, for instance, considers what African spiritualisms “reveal by transcending the known and venturing into the realm of improbability—or impossibility” in speculative fiction. Ogundiran explores similar possibilities, examining “how fables and parables shape a people.” And Stephen Embleton unpacks the ways African cosmologies shape history, culture, and experience, laying the groundwork for “creating worlds no one has ever seen before.”

Sitting with grief leads us to linger on Embleton’s engagement with cosmology and the depth of relations that it reveals. What would it mean to take seriously African cosmologies in engaging the question of finding one singular label to encompass all African speculative fiction? Which labels provide the most space to play? Which labels erase African storytellers or obscure their contributions? Which constrain authors to telling—or publishing, more accurately—only certain kinds of stories? Do labels even matter?

The African authors in the collection are struggling to situate themselves within a landscape of publishing that is Western-centric not only in cosmology and ideology but also within the material distribution of funding and resources. I wonder to what extent the question of labeling is itself a product of colonial thinking. In the Western publishing world, in part because of capitalism’s material pressures, labels are often based in a logic of identification rather than one of relation. By contrast, this book presents a fascinating map of relations in its textured exploration of African authors’ narration and naming practices. Rather than providing one title that authors must contort themselves to fit, the book allows them to explore the complexity of relations they are a part of, and to decide how they would like to situate themselves in that complexity. Even Okungbowa’s overarching umbrella term of “Afrocentric Futurisms” provides a landscape of relations, rather than a singular, rooted name.

That is, sitting with the grief means contemplating how coloniality requires African authors to define themselves in the first place. Maybe this is part of the reason some authors struggle with the white-assigned label of Afrofuturism, or the strictly defined contours separating Africanfuturism from Africanjujuism. Parceling narrative territory into clearly defined possessions that you either identify with or not is, when it comes down to it, a colonial means of thought. Through this lens, Afro-Centered Futurisms does something enormously important in its tensions and frictions, overlap and dispersal: it avoids the colonial logic that reduces an entire group of people to a flattened identity label, and instead asks readers to understand the complexity of their relations in the world. It compels us to spend time with difficulties that cannot easily be smoothed over, and to see what beauties might emerge from bitterness.