The Impact of Afrofuturism on the Voice and Identity in Contemporary Black Female Narratives

Subject Areas : Applied Linguistics

Zahra Hashemi ¹ , Hossan Shahabi ² , Mehry Haddad Narafshan ³

1 - Dept. of English Language and Literature, Kerman Branch. Islamic Azad University, Kerman, Iran
2 - Dept. of English Language and Literature, Kerman Branch. Islamic Azad University, Kerman, Iran
3 - Department of Foreign Languages, Kerman Branch, Islamic Azad University, Kerman, Iran

Received: 2023-02-09 Accepted : 2023-03-03 Published : 2023-09-01

Keywords: Afrofuturism, voice, African writers, Identity, race, Octavia Butler, Nnedi Okorafor,

Abstract :

Afrofuturism is described as a new genre of speculative fiction which converges speculative and realist modes in order to explore amalgamation between African Diasporas, African American writing, and the modern technologies. Contemporary Black female novelists have utilized Afrofuturism as an umbrella under which Womanism and Black Feminism fall to address topics such as voice, identity, and race to show the quandary of the African woman and how she has tried to overcome her plights and regain her selfhood. The aim of this study was to compare and analyze the works of contemporary and pioneering African female authors Octavia Butler and Nnedi Okorafor who have portrayed ground-breaking strategies in their protagonists’ attainment of power, voice, survival and embracement of alternative identities through Afrofuturism and ultimately reclaimed the identity and voice of the Black womanhood. This descriptive-review study was designed with a library approach, and the theoretical approach utilized was the Feminist and anti-racist theories of Ytasha L. Womack’s Afrofuturism. Based on the review of the two texts, the results indicated that Afrofuturism as a womanist movement in the African-American contemporary literary scene has been more successful in empowering and giving the African women’s identity than the western-based feminism.