Orwell, Afrofuturism, and Queer Speculative Fiction

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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 languageEnglish
Title of host publicationThe Oxford Handbook of George Orwell
PublisherOxford University Press (OUP)
Pages702-725
Number of pages24
ISBN (Electronic)9780191892684
ISBN (Print)9780198860693
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 20 Feb 2025

Publication series

NameThe Oxford Handbook of George Orwell
PublisherOxford 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

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