Hacking Animals for Decolonial Futures

ABSTRACT: Africanfuturistic fiction and its proliferating body of scholarship mark the significance of future-oriented imaginings from, about, and for Africa. In such alternative futures, animals are often uncritically read to bear the burden and violence of change in renewed anticolonial, post-capitalist imaginings. This article is interested in the ways in which the animal is integrated into the "new emancipatory mindscapes" (Lavender and Yaszek 3) of African future-oriented imaginings. Deji Bryce Olukotun's treatment of bio- and animal technology in an Africanfuturistic context makes visible the violent structures of uncritical bioeconomic discourses and institutionalized discourses of biomimicry. The representation of biochemical defenses in Nigerians in Space and the techno-euphoric speculations of sustainable bioeconomies in After the Flare bring into focus the modes of integrating and mastering nature that distort and obstruct decolonial frameworks in the present and for possible futures. Across both novels, blurred conceptions of sustainability and welfare supply the ideological loopholes for nature to be mastered through deepened colonial architectures.