This article examines the way that secrecy and silence are raised from the level of colonial imposition to postcolonial methodology in Amitav Ghosh’s The Calcutta Chromosome. Drawing on Ghosh’s claim that any attempt at forming a counter-modernity to the experience of imperial modernization would necessarily have had to operate without record, it argues that silence and secrecy form a counter-hegemonic practice to the instrumentalizing form of Western rationality. As such, the novel performs a postcolonial decentering of futuricity from Western capitalist epistemology, eschewing a mastery of the past to reopen the possibility of a future beyond imperial logic.
This article reconsiders Abderrahmane Sissako's 2006 film Bamako as a formal example of sf predicated upon an African-utopian impulse that intervenes in the political closure of capitalist realism and the ontology of debt perpetuated by structural adjustment programs. Due to the radically unlikely events of the film's narrative, in which international financial institutions can be put on trial by ordinary citizens, this article argues that Bamako is best understood as an sf “alternate cosmology” narrative. Moreover, given the pseudo-utopian ideologies of neoliberal and neo-imperial enterprises, this article examines how Bamako operates as the preconceptual figuration of African-utopianism itself. To do so, it first raises a pseudo-African-utopianism in order to negate it and point the way toward the structurally unenunciable, inconceivable content of a radical African-utopianism. As such, Bamako needs to be read as both a desire for and a preconceptual harbinger of African-utopianism and situated alongside the rise of African sf more broadly.
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