Afrofuturism in Nigerian Literature and Popular Culture: Genre, Technology, and the Politics of African Futures

This dissertation examines Afrofuturism as a literary, cultural, and political practice in contemporary Nigerian literature and popular culture, developing an original theoretical framework that distinguishes the Nigerian and West African inflections of Afrofuturism from its African-American genealogy and that situates the genre within the specific political and social contexts from which Nigerian futures are being imagined. Afrofuturism has emerged as one of the most productive frameworks in global popular culture studies, but its theoretical development has been dominated by African-American scholarship in ways that risk obscuring the distinct forms, concerns, and cosmological resources that West African cultural producers bring to the imagination of African futures. The dissertation traces the emergence of Nigerian Afrofuturism across literary fiction, including the work of Nnedi Okofor and Tade Thompson, Afrobeats music, digital art, and comic book production, constructing an account of a distinctively West African genre formation that draws on Yoruba, Igbo, and broader African cosmological traditions, the specific experience of Nigerian colonial and postcolonial modernity, and contemporary concerns with climate change, technological development, and Pan-African political aspiration. Original theoretical contributions include a model of Nigerian Afrofuturism as a genre that performs cosmological retrieval rather than nostalgic Afrocentrism, a theory of the relationship between Afrofuturism and the politics of extractive capitalism in the Niger Delta, and an original account of the role of diaspora cultural exchange in the development of Nigerian speculative fiction. Keywords: Afrofuturism, Nigerian fiction, speculative fiction, popular culture, African futures.