Pigments and Concentrates: Comparative Hues of Speculative Imaginaries in the Works of Amos Tutuola and Nnedi Okorafor

The discourse of the speculative in African literature is a growing area of interest in postcolonial studies. Whilst extant literatures have interrogated a good number of African speculative fictions to examine their conventions, styles, and presentations of the speculative in such narratives, critical attention has not been given to a comparative mode that examines inventions, re-inventions and applications of varying strands of imagination stemming from within the spectra of myths and science fiction, and this is what this study attempts to unpack. In the study, the works of two writers of Nigerian descent, Amos Tutuola and Nnedi Okorafor, and their unique applications of the hues of virtual, visual, and concrete imaginaries on the canvas of speculative expressiveness, are our focus. Drawing insights from the theory of speculative fiction, the study analyzes comparative and textual modes, the speculative tenors in Amos Tutola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard (1946), My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (1954) and in Nnedi Okorafor’s Who Fears Death (2010) and Lagoon (2014), randomly selecting excerpts from different segments of the novels which constitute the data. The data are then subjected to critical analysis through thematic codes to unpack how the speculative are brought to the fore through intertextuality, and how the writers relate in influence, conviction, individual style, context and application of different depths of verisimilitude.