Turn to the East: Afrofuturism 2.0, African Futurism and Sinofuturism in Speculative Theory, Criticism and Practice
A special issue of Humanities (ISSN 2076-0787).
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 1 November 2025 | Viewed by 403
Special Issue Editor
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
The engagement between China and the African Union with its diverse regions is a 21st century phenomenon. The speculative imagination has long been a tool for non-European communities to reclaim agency, reimagine identity, and critique oppressive systems. This special issue explores non-Western futuristic movements and their chronopolitcs—Afrofuturism 2.0, African Futurism, and Sinofuturism—as frameworks for decolonizing narratives of technology, culture, and power. While Afrofuturism interrogates Black diasporic futures through African cosmologies and resistance to colonialism, Sinofuturism examines China’s rapid technological ascendance as a form of "distributed artificial intelligence" embedded in globalized labor and cultural flows. Both movements challenge Eurocentric visions of progress, offering radical alternatives to hegemonic futurisms. Afrofuturism re-centers agency through mytho-forms, philosophy, and alternate histories; African Futurism explores the agency and realities of people on the African continent; and Sinofuturism seeks to reframe China’s technological rise as collective post-human agency. Chronopolitics examines how both movements manipulate time—Afrofuturism via “revisionist histories” and Sinofuturism through accelerating industrial timelines. By turning “to the East,” this project illuminates how contemporary Afrofuturism, African Futurism and Sinofuturism dismantle colonial futurisms, engage each other and offer blueprints for visions of tomorrow.
Dr. Reynaldo Anderson
Guest Editor
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Keywords
- speculative imagination
- Afrofuturism 2.0
- decolonizing narratives
- black diasporic futures
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