I vividly remember going back and forth with a Reviewer #2 about an article I wrote several years ago that analysed novels by Octavia Butler, Nalo Hopkinson and Nnedi Okorafor. This reviewer kept insisting that the antagonist of Nnedi Okorafor’s Who Fears Death—in which a young woman in a fictional African nation must do battle with the sorcerer who fathered her in an act of mass rape—must have been a white slave owner. The reviewer could not process that there were no white people in Okorafor’s novel or that African and African American women experience sexual and reproductive violence in linked—but-different ways.

I open with this vignette to emphasise the sorely needed intervention of Kimberly Cleveland’s wide-ranging Africanfuturism: African Imaginings of Other Times, Spaces and Worlds, which highlights continental African creatives’ intersections of speculation, technology and the future. Cleveland points out that Afrofuturism often lumps in African creatives without adequate consideration of their distinct geographical, sociopolitical and cultural dimensions. She argues that Afrofuturism reflects a diasporic perspective not suited to the task of imagining African futures—a task with very real stakes for postcolonial nations.Footnote ¹ Prioritising its rich archive over theoretical explication or dense secondary scholarship, Africanfuturism moves fluidly and briskly through several texts per chapter, gathering them under relevant themes.

Opening with a brief consideration of the global impact of Marvel’s 2018 Black Panther, the first chapter discusses how science fiction (SF) and Afrofuturism both perpetuate colonial logics—through the colonial origins of Western SF and the tendency of African American Afrofuturists to use Africa as a fictional ‘stage’ or playground to act out their own desires, selectively drawing on and flattening African cultures and histories in the process.Footnote ¹ Cleveland then traces the origins of Africanfuturism as African creatives’ autonomous naming practice for a futurism that is particular, decolonial and aimed towards an African audience.

Chapter Two focuses on African experiments in two of SF’s most recurring tropes: space travel and time travel. In one of the book’s most significant interventions, Cleveland argues that rather than using such tropes to remove European colonisation and its impacts (the ‘what if’ often posed by Afrofuturism’s African utopias), African creatives tend to move from what has happened, asking ‘What now?’ Chapter Three, ‘Creating Worlds’, seeks to answer that question while surveying several fascinating examples of alternative worldbuilding in African visual and multimedia. She insists that worlds such as the futuristic post-drought society of Wanuri Kahiu’s film Pumzi and the architectural city models of artist Bodys Isek Kingelez are empowering without needing to be utopic about the regional realities of African peoples’ lives.

Chapter Four, ‘Technology and the Digital Divide’, argues that African cultural production overturns assumptions about African relationships to technology. From short fiction to multimedia arts, Cleveland notes the recurring coexistence of states often presented in opposition to one another in the West: the local and the global, cultural values and technological change, human connection and geographic distance, and different temporality: past, present and future. This discussion dovetails nicely into the fifth chapter, ‘Sankofa and Remix’, which explores literary works, graphic novels, visual art and community projects that explicitly remix the past in order to build better futures. Chapter Five, ‘Mythmaking’, examines the many dynamic ways that African artists retell myths and use them to inform the present and future, recuperating Afro-mythology’s flexible vitality from Western attempts to freeze myth within a distant past.

Interestingly, Africanfuturism relies heavily on a few interlocutors, especially Mark Dery, and structures the book through Dery’s definition of Afrofuturism. This approach overlooks recent efforts of black thinkers to problematise and decentre a white critic as an originator of Afrofuturist theory (highlighting, for example, the heavy genealogical and theoretical lifting of Greg Tate, Tricia Rose and Samuel Delany in the very interview where Dery coins the term). The use of Dery’s definition of Afrofuturism seems to contain the most significant dimensions of Africanfuturism in how it parallels Afrofuturism and undermines the study’s goal to centre African voices as the theorists of Africanfuturism as a distinct formation.

Still, Cleveland’s Africanfuturism is an essential contribution to the study of Africana speculative cultures. It amplifies a rich archive and offers productive pathways for future work in the area. Cleveland writes in clear, engaging prose and provides discussion questions and additional reading recommendations at the close of each chapter. This accessibility makes Africanfuturism an excellent choice for undergraduate classrooms and non-academic readers, as well as specialists in the field.