Beschreibung:
<jats:p>Nnedi Okorafor is a member of a growing vanguard of global SF/F authors who challenge the hegemony of SF as a purely Western genre. This decentering of SF foremost demands a critical engagement with its dominant, operative tropes. In this light,<jats:italic>Lagoon</jats:italic>subverts the stock colonial ideology long associated with the first contact alien invasion narrative. Drawing on Afrofuturist criticism, this essay argues that<jats:italic>Lagoon</jats:italic>utilizes the figure of the alien in order to examine Nigeria as both an object of the neoliberal futures industry and a progenitor of radical anti-neoimperial futurity. Rather than merely incorporating the predominantly Americentric determinations of much Afrofuturist thought wholesale, however, the novel demands a rethinking of the role of the alien from an African-utopian perspective. Ultimately, this requires a reconsideration of the work of the SF<jats:italic>novum</jats:italic>itself in line with Alain Badiou’s conception of the event, whereby the introduction of the SF novum of the alien can be seen as a placeholder for the unknowable, unforeseeable eruption of a radical, historical event: the reawakening of a seemingly structurally unrepresentable anticolonial subjectivity that is pitched against the ideological confines of the neoliberal present.</jats:p>