Abstract
This chapter examines the legacy of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four in a selection of queer speculative and Afrofuturist novels by British, Japanese, Ghanaian-American, Nigerian, and American writers published between the late 1970s and early 2020s. Kay Dick’s They (1977, reprinted 2022), Yoko Ogawa’s The Memory Police (1994; translated 2019), Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s ‘Zimmer Land’ (2018), Namwali Serpell’s The Old Drift (2019), and Marisa Crane’s I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself (2023), I argue, dismantle the white supremacist, patriarchal, heteronormative, and western imperialist principles undergirding Orwell’s text and its most famous descendants, the majority of which are by white Anglo-American male writers. By replacing the individual narrative with a collective one, centring the stories of the oppressed, and sidelining the structures and systems that render their worlds oppressive to focus, instead, on the everyday and, very often, the home, Dick, Ogawa, Serpell, and Crane problematize the Orwellian tradition and reconceptualize the genre of dystopian fiction. I contextualize these texts both within the respective histories to which they allude and within the history of queer speculative and Afrofuturist fiction more generally.
Original language | English |
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Title of host publication | The Oxford Handbook of George Orwell |
Publisher | Oxford University Press (OUP) |
Pages | 702-725 |
Number of pages | 24 |
ISBN (Electronic) | 9780191892684 |
ISBN (Print) | 9780198860693 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 20 Feb 2025 |
Publication series
Name | The Oxford Handbook of George Orwell |
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Publisher | Oxford University Press (OUP) |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© Oxford University Press 2025. All rights reserved.
Keywords
- Afrofuturism
- Dystopia
- Kay Dick
- Marisa Crane
- Namwali Serpell
- Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
- Orwellian
- Queer speculative fiction
- Yoko Ogawa
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- General Social Sciences