Afrofuturist worlds
Identity, technology, and resistance in Andrea Hairston’s Redwood and Wildfire
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 6030163 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Sana Altaf (0000-0003-3859-9621, Islamia College of Science and Commerce, corresponding author), Aqib Javaid Parry (Prince Sattam Bin Abdulaziz University), A Parry (0000-0003-2826-166X, Prince Sattam Bin Abdulaziz University) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Pages | 1-12 |
| Publication date | 2025-05-08 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | African Identities (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1472-5843 • E-ISSN: 1472-5851 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/14725843.2025.2501806 |
| OpenAlex | W4410206259 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 6 |
The African-American author and filmmaker Ytasha Womack defines Afrofuturism as a prominent aesthetic and literary movement that explores the merging of Black culture with elements of imagination, liberation, technology, and mysticism. Writers within this genre strive to imagine future scenarios that integrate Black cultural perspectives, addressing present-day challenges faced by people of colour. They also critique dominant White interpretations of the past and the future, emphasising racial and identity politics. Afrofuturist literature creates fictional worlds where advanced technologies harmonise with traditional forms of knowledge, offering insights into how Black protagonists navigate their exclusion from envisioned future realms. This paper aims to analyse the novel Redwood and Wildfire (2011) by African-American writer Andrea Hairston within the framework of Afrofuturism. It will explore how the novel constructs its speculative world by blending elements of the twentieth-century technological landscape with African or diasporic cultural elements, folklore, mysticism, and history. It also seeks to explore how the novel critiques colonial legacies and manifests traits of liberation, empowerment, and resistance against oppression through erstwhile colonised and characters of colour who seek to negotiate their identity in the contemporary scenario and utilise their cultural traditions and magic/supernatural elements to assert their agency in a world governed by Western epistemology and Eurocentric assumptions
Aesthetics · Biology · Humanities · Digital Games and Media · Gothic Literature and Media Analysis · Philosophy · Utopian, Dystopian, and Speculative Fiction · Ecology
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |