Cosmos and Polis: Space and Place in Nnedi Okorafor's SF

While much work on postcolonial and African sf centers on temporality and possible futures, this article argues for a consideration of the geographic imaginary as well. Using Nnedi Okorafor's recent works Lagoon (2014) and the Binti series (2015-2018), it examines issues of space and place in the texts, especially how the use of a cosmological scale allows for a utopian rethinking of belonging, identity, and who counts as “alien.” In particular, the article claims, Okorafor's narratives engage a flexible understanding of place as the scale shifts from city to cosmos and back, arguing not for the dissolution of place in favor of universalism, but for transformative communication and connection across geographic and discursive boundaries. Okorafor's fiction envisions a genuinely postcolonial world in which Afro-centered identities and relations are simultaneously enabled, complicated, and transformed by and within complex geographies of planetary and cosmological connection, while nevertheless maintaining and valuing local particularity.