The London Olympics starts tonight and certain streets of the city are swollen with purple-shirted volunteers, track-suited athletes and tourists. In Hyde Park, the continent of Africa has been reincarnated as ‘Africa Village’ and ‘Africa Land’; the emphasis is on colour and diversity, mass acceptance of bland positivisms, but the whole event feels mainly about corporate […]
Guest post by Evelyn Owen Last week, I scuttled along to London’s Southbank Centre for the Africa Sci-Fi Screening, an event forming part of the month-long Africa Utopia season. Having failed to make it to Bristol in time to catch the event’s parent exhibition – Superpower: Africa in Science Fiction at the Arnolfini, I was […]
Since Sun Ra descended in a breast-shaped Ark to recruit Americans for his planetary Afrotopia, science fiction has played a significant role in representations of African life. The original past represented by Africa as ‘cradle-of-civilization’ has recently been inverted in work which measures futuristic narratives against everyday life on the continent. Now the Arnolfini gallery […]
