2.00pm - 5.00pm
Free, no booking required

The Showroom, 63 Penfold Street, London NW8 8PQ

The Otolith Collective and The Showroom present Laingian Science Fiction, the first lecture in the Continental Afrofutures Lecture Series.

It is often pointed out that the Africanity in Afrofuturism takes no account of the invention or the production of African futures. That the Afrofuturisms formulated during the 1990s and resurgent in the 21st Century, were and are elaborated as Afrodiasporic projects by practitioners in the UK and the USA. The constraints of Afrofuturism, then and now, therefore obliges continental practitioners to either adapt the term to take account of the specificity of African futures or to invent a new concept capable of grasping the range of contemporary practices across the continent that seek to invent the future.

In the Continental Afrofutures Lectures, Kodwo Eshun argues that works that have and continue to invent the future already exist across the continent. Such works constitute a substantial genealogy of overlooked futurisms, futurities and speculations whose complexity constitutes a series of calculated interventions into the manufacture of the chronopolitical. More

The Continental Afrofutures Lecture begins with a lecture on novelist Kojo Laing's Major Gentl and the Achimota Wars. Published in 1992 and set in 2020, Laing's third novel Major Gentl and the Achimota Wars is an astonishing text that treats the novel as a subset of animation and literature as a subspecies of cartoon. Laing envisions a condition of total war known as the Second War of Existence in which insects, birds, fruit, animals, vegetables and the humans of Achimota City wage a war for the right to futurity against an overseas enemy only discernible through proxies and decoys.

The first lecture in the Continental Afrofutures Series takes place on Saturday 27 February from 2pm to 5pm at The Showroom. For more details, please visit the The Showroom or The Otolith Collective.