The Alien Within: Divergent Futures in Nnedi Okorafor's Lagoon and Neill Blomkamp's District 9

In the contemporary crisis of race relations two schools of thought pursue the project of Black liberation: Afrofuturism and Afropessimism. Through a close reading of Neill Blomkamp's Afropessimist film District 9 (2009) and Nnedi Okorafor's Afrofuturist novel Lagoon (2014), written in response to the film, this article analyzes these projects' futures. While Afropessimism offers incisive critiques of historic and contemporary racism, the future it imagines is either a repetition of the past or a violent revolution. Afrofuturism, in contrast, imagines a future that breaks from colonially inherited racism by emphasizing traditional and indigenous African cultures. By narrating human being through something other than the framework of an imposed colonialism, Afrofuturism can imagine an end to the alienation District 9 depicts as largely inevitable. In order for Afrofuturism's future to be realized in white majority or white dominated societies (such as South Africa), however, the burden of eliminating these racist conceptions falls on white people. Afrofuturism can provide this much needed alternative model of African diasporic humanity and therefore serve as a conceptual foundation for a future that does not look like the past.