The environmental crisis and African women’s displacements in War Girls by Tochi Onyebuchi

In the following article, I explore several types of dislocations (environmental, war, patriarchal, to name but a few) in Tochi Onyebuchi’s novel War Girls (2019), analysed from the methodological perspective of Africanfuturism. The aim of the article is to show how the second wave of African future...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Tydskrif vir letterkunde Vol. 62; no. 1
Main Author: Katarzyna Ostalska
Format: Journal Article
Language:Afrikaans
Published: Tydskrif vir Letterkunde Association 01.04.2025
Subjects:
Africanfuturism
new technologies
posthumanism
the environmental crisis
War Girls
ISSN:0041-476X, 2309-9070
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:In the following article, I explore several types of dislocations (environmental, war, patriarchal, to name but a few) in Tochi Onyebuchi’s novel War Girls (2019), analysed from the methodological perspective of Africanfuturism. The aim of the article is to show how the second wave of African future-oriented literature (diasporic in this case) looks back to the past (the Nigerian Civil War) in order to seek solutions for the ongoing current problems, such as the devastation of the natural environment, climate change, the participation of underage soldiers in military conflicts, and new forms of capitalism and neolonialisation. The novel is read via historical, sociological, and frequently anthropological sources to demonstrate how the speculative discourse can be firmly grounded in the scientific context. Additionally, I propose a feminist and utopian reading of War Girls. The text is divided into parts where key elements of Africanfuturism—such as digitalisation, nanotechnologies, Information Technology, African cosmologies, and oral tradition—are discussed in detail and are shown as existing at the same time, entangled with the past and future simultaneously, within human and more-than-human worlds. 
ISSN:0041-476X
2309-9070
DOI:10.17159/ca216c03