"Can We Imagine a World Without Funds or Banks?": Abderrahmane Sissako's Bamako as African-Utopian Speculative Fiction

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.