“Decolonial Dreamwork is an original and compelling intervention in speculative decolonial studies. Through readings of African speculative texts and powerful engagement with questions of imagination, embodiment, and futurity, Hanchey shows how dreaming itself can be a vital practice of transformative worldmaking.” —David Higgins, author of Reverse Colonization: Science Fiction, Imperial Fantasy and Alt-Victimhood
“Decolonial Dreamwork brilliantly frames dreaming and the emplaced, embodied process of writing as fundamental tools for entering non-linear temporalities and navigating societal structures through the power of shared stories. By including her own stories, Hanchey both models and invites the reader directly into the communicative process of decolonial dreamwork.”—Isaac Joslin, author of Afrofuturisms: Ecology, Humanity, and Francophone Cultural Expressions
Incorporates creative writing and analysis of contemporary African speculative fiction to center dreams as a tool for liberation.
In Decolonial Dreamwork, Jenna Hanchey centers dreaming, both waking and sleeping, to examine how Africanfuturism enables futures beyond the “reality” of what developmental imperatives deem possible. Engaging with the speculative fiction of Tade Thompson, Shingai Njeri Kagunda, Yvette Lisa Ndlovu, Tlotlo Tsamaase, Suyi Davies Okungbowa, Sofia Samatar, Moses Ose Utomi, and the Sauúti Collective, Hanchey demonstrates how these works provide a roadmap for decolonial dreaming—imagining beyond the conceptual limits Western paradigms impose. Connecting African and Indigenous thought, Decolonial Dreamwork shows how the labor of imagining beyond coloniality is nonlinear, embodied, emplaced, liquid, and reliant on multiplicities of stories.
As both a scholar and speculative fiction writer, Hanchey blends analysis with examples of her own creative work to demonstrate the importance of not only reading African speculative fiction but joining in and dreaming alongside it. Punctuated with exercises and prompts, Decolonial Dreamwork functions as a participatory workbook for liberation that will that will be as generative for classrooms and book clubs as it is for theory development. We can all tell stories, Hanchey exhorts readers, that break colonial realities and create space for better worlds.
Jenna Hanchey is Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Critical/Cultural Studies at Arizona State University. She is the author of The Center Cannot Hold: Decolonial Possibility in the Collapse of a Tanzanian NGO. Her fiction can be found in Strange Horizons and elsewhere.
Contents
ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction Decolonial Dreamwork Is . . .
Chapter 1 Nonlinear
Chapter 2 Embodied
Chapter 3 Emplaced
Chapter 4 Liquid
Chapter 5 Storied
Conclusion Ongoing, As We Dream Together . . .
Bibliography
Index
