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-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.

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Publication Details

Journal
SHILAP Revista de lepidopterología
Published
2025-04-01
DOI
https://doi.org/10.17159/ca216c03
Primary Topic
Utopian, Dystopian, and Speculative Fiction
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
0.00
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article

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

SHILAP Revista de lepidopterología
Utopian, Dystopian, and Speculative Fiction
article

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

article en

Abstract

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.

SHILAP Revista de lepidopterología
University of Łódź (PL)
Gender equality
Openalex Percentile: Top 63%
Utopian, Dystopian, and Speculative Fiction
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The environmental crisis and African women’s displacements in War Girls by Tochi Onyebuchi · SHILAP Revista de lepidopterología (2025) | TGRS Research Map | TGRS