Sensing the Future in Contemporary Anglophone Literature: Utopian Practice in Times of Global Emergency

Abstract

Due to contemporary experiences of climate crisis, large-scale migration, and global ruptures such as the spread of COVID-19, futurity has become newly problematized in both public discourse and critical discussions in literary and cultural studies. This article argues that literary texts contribute to the renegotiation of futurity for the cultural needs of the present. The article discusses how two contemporary Anglophone novels, Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West (2017) and Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon (2014), redirect both ecocritical and critical posthumanist concerns towards an ethics of open futurity that is, counterintuitively, contiguous with the humanist philosophies of Hannah Arendt and Emmanuel Levinas. The novels express forms of anticipation in which open futurity and the experience of encounter with the other form a basic ethical orientation, thereby pointing to an emergent reshaping of utopian practice in times of global emergency.

I. Sensing the Future in Times of Trouble

In 2013, the cultural critic Leslie Adelson wrote: “Futurity is pressing” (213). In the decade to follow, the future has been exerting pressure on the planetary present to an ever-increasing degree, and another rallying call—the motto of the global ecological activist network Extinction Rebellion—has entered our public discourse on the future: “This is an emergency” (“Tell the Truth”). The declaration coined by Extinction Rebellion seems to be the expression of the times: the rise of popu-list politics, wars and ensuing migration crises, and global redistributions and inequalities due to climate change and the aftermath of the COVID-19 crisis have spawned renewed calls for urgent action on the future. As people encounter new challenges, their agency to shape the future is also challenged by having to come terms with the agency of the non-human—such as viruses or climate effects—that question conventional human strategies to both predict and react to large-scale change. Challenges that are not yet fully graspable by human ways of understanding will in turn change human behavior. Humans struggle to adapt as their ways of life are threatened by non-human actors. Simultaneously, fundamental questions about human identity have become newly current in academic discussions, due not only to a growing recognition of non-human others in our human environments but also to our increased interconnectedness with artificial intelligence. The COVID-19 pandemic, in particular, has had a crystalizing effect on surveillance and our growing reliance on digital communication: populations were more closely monitored in their movements, not only on an encompassing scale in states like China but in other countries that restricted and surveilled individuals’ movements. Because of these restrictions to movement, forms of digital communication became more vital for both private and professional communication. Overall, the fact that “futurity is pressing” has moved to the center of public discourse because of a pervading sense that “we” as “humans”—with all our machine, organic, and textual kinships, to speak in the idiom of Donna Haraway (Haraway Reader 2)—need to catch up fast with the future’s challenges if we wish to have one at all.

What might contemporary Anglophone literature have to offer when searching for a new way to imagine and experience futurity in times of global emergency? What is the shape of utopian texts when “futurity is pressing,” and how do they sense the future? Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West (2017) and Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon (2014) reimagine anticipation in the present. I use Adelson’s work on the experimental short prose of Alexander Kluge, in which she locates a specific future sense (Cosmic Miniatures 125–47), to understand sensing the future as a practice of anticipation that is not yet fully available to everyday discourse and agency. Sensing the future means experientially reconfiguring the future with a different trajectory than the established modern notion of the future bound to capitalism—as a project that one consciously strives to achieve and capitalize on, what Mark Fisher calls the futurism of “SF Capital” (see Eshun 290–91). Fisher, and others like Sherryl Vint who use a similar notion, refers to fictions of the future that can be invested in and commodified. I understand sensing the future, in contrast to capitalist futurism, as a literary tactic that defies commodifiable ideas of the future. Raymond Williams’ concept of “structures of feeling” (128–35), in which he describes ways of expressing material, social experiences “to which the fixed forms do not speak at all, which indeed they do not recognize” (129), is useful for my discussion here. Practices of sensing the future in the novels by Hamid and Okorafor point towards an emerging, procedural form of anticipation. As textual practices, they circumvent or suspend established discourse on the future by forgoing a finite formulation of what, exactly, is anticipated. To cite Williams again, futurity in these texts is in “an embryonic phase” (131), tentative and open to reinterpretation. I propose that some contemporary Anglophone fiction includes such expressions of anticipation that do not yet have fixed, easily recognizable forms, but that begin to reformulate the relationship of literature to the future in a present of global emergency.

Literature’s relationship to the future has undergone many changes in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: there is, put bluntly, a sense that at least since the time after the Great War, and certainly after World War II, utopian writing has been generally understood as problematic, while dystopian literature has proliferated (Claeys). Modern literature addressed the future with an acute sense of loss, and postmodern culture, as Mark Currie argues, has developed into a feedback loop (42) in which the cycles of nostalgic remediation and premediation are becoming ever shorter, as we can observe in the proliferation of “retro” cultures and lifestyles (46). By contrast, contemporary fiction is shaping futurity as newly engaged with a very old-fashioned human form of anticipation: hope. In returning to and reframing the notion of hope, contemporary fiction might not re-embrace utopian writing in the sense of envisioning and laying out social and political systems. Even though this kind of utopian writing exists in contemporary fiction, it is not what I wish to describe as sensing the future. While readers might expect the proposal of such a political or social system from utopian writing (and proposals in that direction can be found, for example, in the novels of Kim Stanley Robinson), sensing the future is much more strongly about experientially confronting alterity. This fiction is marked by turning towards an other, in apprehending a future the shape of which is always malleable. It is about encountering the future as other and not fully comprehensible.

Rather than searching for a salvation in finding the “right” solution to global problems, the novels link hopeful anticipation to alterity, changing, and opening up—not only by accepting the rights of non-humans, but by reframing what exactly it means to be human. In Hamid’s and Okorafor’s texts, sensing the future is acutely situated in an understanding of the contemporary that has been short-handed as the Anthropocene—they implicitly accept that human economies, politics, and behaviors since industrialization are the main factors that have shaped the world as it is today, including the responsibility of pending climate catastrophe. One might expect, then, that these fictions espouse the idioms of critical posthumanism. However, Hamid’s and Okorafor’s novels are contiguous with notions of humaneness and compassion that are more akin to the thought of humanist philosophers of the twentieth century, such as Hannah Arendt or Emmanuel Levinas. While the novels partake in the practice of utopian writing and thinking reshaped by a contemporary experience of the future as planetary, they withdraw from illustrating new, “perfect” world systems. Before I discuss exactly how these texts sense the future, I need to include a short detour on futurology.

Understanding the future as planetary—as shaped by human actions, and far extending national interests—has been a trend in futurology since the Cold War. As Jenny Andersson argues, thinking about the future in the later twentieth and the early twenty-first centuries is predicated on a rediscovery of the future as “the future of the world” in post-war mathematical social science and its prediction models. By thinking about the future as world future, the idea of an ending of the world—apocalyptic thinking—re-entered secular modernity, first in the fear of nuclear destruction and later in the awareness of pending climate catastrophe, which were both corroborated by mathematical models that predicted the effects of these events and secularized a sense of determinism and possibility of “knowing the future” or feasible futures. The return of apocalyptic thinking has inspired authors to think about humanity, the world, and time in a way that reinforces a relationship to future entities with a focus on ethics, which I relate to the philosophical writing of Levinas and Arendt.

The civilizational catastrophe of the Holocaust led Arendt and Levinas to their intellectual struggle to turn the tenets of political philosophy and phenomenology on their head: they changed the orientation of phenomenology’s concept of being in time from death to survival— from being overwhelmed by the traumatic experience of the Holocaust and longing for a past “before” to hope for the future—not by erasing the past but by rebuilding an anticipatory imaginary despite and because of the experience of trauma. Civilizational failure and dehumanization—through the Holocaust and the atomic attack on Japan—can be seen as a catalyst that returns modern philosophy to the possibility of apocalypse. Simultaneously, this reappearance of the specter of the end of the world spurred the transformation of phenomenology from an ontology into an ethics that is, in Arendt’s writing, utopian, hopeful, and directed towards survival.

Svetlana Boym locates this shift in Arendt’s thought in the latter’s conception of the relationship between “worldliness” and estrangement. Boym holds that Arendt does not advocate hiding from worldly catastrophe in an intellectual turn inwards, as an estrangement from the world, but rather promotes becoming a “worldly” philosopher through a strategy of “estrangement for the world” (227; emphasis in original). This estrangement for the world, in the sense of a turn outwards, acknowledges difference and alterity as the foundation of every encounter in the world and as central to a renewed form of humaneness. In Boym’s interpretation of Arendt’s work, this “humaneness” is “[a]n acknowledgement of the integral human plurality that we must recognize within us and within others. This is a way of seeing the world anew, a possibility of a new beginning that is fundamental for aesthetic experience, critical judgement and political action” (227). Within literature, this “estrangement for the world” might include fantastic elements, imaginations of the (not yet) real, as well as magical realist strategies. The stress on the recognition of otherness as a basis of Arendt’s worldly philosophy resonates not only with Levinas’ ethics of encounter but also with the worldly fiction of Hamid and Okorafor, in whose literary strategies one can find a similar “estrangement for the world,” an inclusion of the fantastic in service of the real world and its future.

The novels I discuss in this essay fold the shock of the contemporary situation—the anticipation of another civilizational rupture in the form of climate change and the posthuman future—back into the utopian tradition of fiction. Textual strategies include the novels’ focus on affect and experientiality in connection with futurity. These texts sense the future by employing a strategy of estrangement as well as an experiential and visceral aesthetic. They stress the poetic aspect of utopian endeavors and their relation to the imaginary and the experimental—in short, the strange. “Estrangement for the world” is fundamental not only for futurity as an aesthetic strategy but also for futurity’s relationship to freedom as a fundamental right.

In her essays in Between Past and Future, Arendt identifies freedom as connected to agency and the capacity to initiate newness. For Arendt, the idea of agere, of setting something in motion, creates “an experience in which being free and the capacity to begin something new coincide” (166). To put it simply, the idea of freedom is unthinkable for her without the capacity to act for an open future. Hamid’s and Okorafor’s novels address this centrality of a capacity to act in their narratives of futurity. Levinas’ ethics, based on the openness of encounter with the other rather than on a bounded stability of one’s own identity, also provides an entry point into how these novels sense the future. In Levinas’ philosophy, futurity, rather than death, is the fundamental orientation of life. As Russell West-Pavlov states, it is “the futurity of the unpredictable encounter with the other” (48) that orients being in time for Levinas. Levinas’ thinking aligns with Boym’s interpretation of plurality as a foundation of ethics, aesthetics, and politics in Arendt’s writing. However, in the Anthropocene this plurality extends far beyond the human—to both non-human species and climatic and geological processes. In climate catastrophe, humanity faces a planetary process that is not yet fully understood as its ultimate other—and this has grave effects on human self-understanding as beings in time.

But why, one might ask, should analyses of contemporary literature return to such contested terms as futurity and even utopia? Have critical posthumanists not laid those ideas to rest as the very concepts that would have to be rejected in a rewriting of modernity because they are not only partaking in but can even be seen as co-constitutive of the problems of modernity’s colonial and economical exploitations that have caused our global predicaments? Indeed, Haraway writes in the introduction to her monograph Staying with the Trouble:

Staying with the trouble does not require such a relationship to times called the future. In fact, staying with the trouble requires learning to be truly present, not as a vanishing pivot between awful or edenic pasts and apocalyptic or salvific futures, but as mortal critters entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters, meanings.

(1)

While a rethinking of the “relationship to times called the future” and the entanglements of mattering that Haraway mentions are important interventions, I caution against abandoning attention to futurity, especially for the analysis of contemporary fiction. As “mortal critters,” humans are, like all life-forms, beings in time, and narrative, by definition a temporal operation, is a basic form of human sense-making. Although narrative often recounts a past, it always reaches into the future. While a narrative is unfolding, both the narrator and the reader know that by the end of the story, a future will have been reached.¹ This narrative—and therefore temporal—conceptualization of existence is so basic to human understanding that within fiction, at least, it is impossible, and implausible, to disregard futurity.

The fact that, according to Arendt, futurity and freedom are so closely interlinked makes the possibility of imagining an open future a fundamental right and ethical prerequisite of freedom. In line with, rather than in contrast to, the aims of ecocritics and critical posthumanists, this ethics of futurity as an ethics of freedom becomes radical once we understand it as encompassing all life and the basis for life. The order of the German Constitutional Court on the constitutional complaints against the Federal Climate Change Act in March 2021 is an example of the construction of a posthuman and ecocritical conception of the relationship of freedom and futurity even in highly institutionalized contexts. While the order does not (yet) accept the rights of nature as a complainant to be represented by advocate groups, the complaints were partially successful because the too-lax German climate change regulations put an undue burden on future generations, negatively impacting “practically every type of freedom” (Bundesverfassungsgericht).² This means not acting—or not acting decisively—on carbon emissions now creates a path dependency or “advance interference-like effect” (Bundesverfassungsgericht) that forecloses the future, the possibility to begin again, and the freedom of the next generations. The path dependencies of climate change contexts are also related to other historical foreclosures of the future. In his collection The Future as Cultural Fact, Arjun Appadurai addresses the global path dependencies that have developed due to colonization and industrialization and the inequalities they create concerning different peoples’ “capacity to aspire” (289). This notion refers to a fundamental capacity to imagine oneself as a viable agent of one’s future. To enable a “capacity to aspire” means to counteract the foreclosure of the future—it is in this act that futurity and freedom coincide, and it is in this coinciding that futurity becomes deeply ethical.

I argue that Exit West and Lagoon are examples of narratives that counteract this path dependency towards non-future and non-freedom, not only in the context of climate change but also with regard to inter-human and posthuman relations. The novels sense a future of “estrangement for the world” (Boym 227) in unexpected encounters, indeterminacy, and magical realist connections, revealing an open future as a fundamental right that extends beyond humanity. The conception of an open future as a fundamental right implies an understanding of the link between futurity and freedom, and Hamid’s and Okorafor’s novels express this basic ethical orientation. Additionally, these texts portray futurity as what underlies anticipation as an emerging social structure of feeling— a form of creative agency on the future.

I propose that emerging literary forms of sensing the future do not fully reject other literary traditions of futurity, but they subtly change them. Because these contemporary novels ask us to read these traditions closely again in light of our current situation, I propose to revisit older forms of literary interventions into the future. In the case of the texts under discussion here, reappraising the emergence of utopian writing in early modern European culture might shed light on how contemporary texts interact with literary tradition. The novels I discuss partake in the tradition of utopian writing as a literary and political form that centers on the topos of mundus inversus—an inverted world. As Marina Leslie writes in her monograph Renaissance Utopias, “insofar as utopia is always already inverted, the relation between utopia and dystopia cannot be readily described as inversion or opposition” (4). Rather, she states, “utopia constitutes a complex textual practice enmeshed in a web of historical contingencies to which it cannot but draw attention even as it struggles to escape” (4). In this sense, utopian practice encompasses both thought and poetry; it is always philosophy and literature connected to its specific social practice and situated historical developments. The ways Exit West and Lagoon sense the future cannot, therefore, be disentangled from the situated perspectives of their authors—from cosmopolitan Pakistani and Nigerian-American perspectives, respectively. These texts sense the future in globalized—but also culturally situated— ways. As inversions of the historical contingent present, both novels, as different as they are stylistically and in their micro-textual strategies, partake in the double affective economy of hope for and fear of the future that are the basic emotional constituents of all utopian/dystopian texts. Even in Okorafor’s triumphant mash-up of creatures, media, myths, and aliens in Lagoon, fear of the future lingers as a subtext, and in Exit West, the fact that anticipated catastrophes do not materialize can be read both as a part of the novel’s magical realist form and as centering the ambivalent relationship of hope and despair.

II. Sensing the Future in Exit West and Lagoon

Exit West narrates the story of a young couple in an adverse and vastly changed “near-after” (J. G. Ballard qtd. in Amis 199–200). Lagoon, based on the premise of the arrival of alien life-forms in Nigeria, follows a similar strategy to Exit West: both texts, to a more or less obvious degree, engage in the fantastic or at least the implausible to sense the future but are simultaneously firmly rooted in major concerns of the present moment: migration and the question of the nation, climate change and ecological destruction, encroaching surveillance and war technology—the sinister flipside to the possibility of social connection promised by digital communication technology. Exit West constructs an intertextual web by alluding to canonized postcolonial writing.³ It is a dialogical novel that, as Shazia Sadaf argues, engages with and moves beyond the postcolonial tradition by negotiating migration, the global, and the relationship between hope and despair from various nodes of a problematically entangled postcolonial/postimperial past (4–6).

Reminiscent of a sci-fi blockbuster, Lagoon launches its action-filled plot by portraying a triumph of kinship that binds animal, human, myth, technology, and alien together in a non-hierarchical web that nevertheless emerges decidedly from Nigeria. The novel thus asserts Nigeria as the place where an open future becomes imaginable. Both novels strongly focus on space. Lagoon focuses on a specific place, the city of Lagos, that is positioned as ground zero of the changed world in Okorafor’s Afrofuturist novel. The plural settings of Exit West—the unnamed city in which the plot first unfolds, the Greek island of Mykonos, London, and California—are sites for a series of encounters with the other that enable a reconfiguration of the social in negotiating precarious and liminal acts of arrival. Exit West can be classified as a cosmopolitan magical realist novel in the way Kim Sasser defines it, as the realist plot centers on a magical trope: doors appear in various places around the globe, through which people may seamlessly move between distant places. The magic doors in Hamid’s story, a main topic of analysis of the novel,⁴ are a textual ploy that enables characters to move out of situations of conflict, crisis, and misfortune. Through the magical doors, the novel’s characters are able to step out of despair and into a new beginning.

The doors in Exit West, however, are not unproblematic spaces of joyful passage. As is the nature of doors, they open a passage in two directions, and while people flee from one side to another in their search for something better than death, they also let fighters and weapons through and therefore bring death, disaster, and conflict. Foundationally, as a novel engaged with and read in the context of the 2015 refugee crisis, Exit West is a war text. Hamid’s narrative portrays a slow build-up of war’s cruelty: it carefully chronicles how war changes both social structures and intimate relations first gradually and then suddenly. When the protagonists Saeed and Nadia first meet, they are modestly aspiring middle-class people in an unnamed city in a country with an unstable government run over by militias and dominated by a religion that is recognizably a militarized version of Islam. While all the other places in the novel’s globe-spanning network of migrations are named, the place of origin of the main protagonists is not, thus defying an idea of a singular location of origin. Hamid himself, as Michael Perfect (6) and Amanda Lagji (2) cite, stated that he had his home city of Lahore in mind while writing but that the indeterminacy of the place of origin of his protagonists was strategic and has been read in line with the novel’s “affirmation of human beings’ ability to identify with each other” (Perfect 5). In many scenes, the novel’s discourse evokes the inversion topos inherent in the utopian genre. Stylistically, Hamid uses a deconstructivist substitution of signifiers to craft inversions on a micro-narrative level by creating subtle shifts in the text’s chains of associations. Hamid uses this textual strategy both in scenes that sense the future and in scenes that create horror, such as the following, which narrates the incident Saeed’s father encounters as he visits the grave of his wife, who has been killed in a drive-by shooting at the beginning of the civil war:

Once as he stood there he saw some young boys playing football and this cheered him, and reminded him of his own skill at the game when he was their age, but then he realized that they were not young boys, but teenagers, young men, and they were not playing with a ball but with the severed head of a goat, and he thought, barbarians, but then it dawned on him that this was the head not of a goat but of a human being, with hair and a beard, and he wanted to believe he was mistaken.

(Hamid 87)

It is via the substitution of signifiers that Saeed’s father’s experience of reality is subtly changed from complacent to horrible: the ball that becomes a goat’s head that becomes a severed human head changes the emotional evaluation of the scene from benevolent nostalgia to outrage to unbelievable horror that one wishes to deny. Using scenes constructed with subtle inversions like the one above, the text makes it emotionally clear why people flee through the magic doors—for example, to London.

The reader learns about the evolving crisis in Saeed’s home country through the news: “The international ones said it was going badly indeed, adding to an unprecedented flow of migrants that was hitting the rich countries, who were building walls and fences and strengthening their borders, but seemingly to unsatisfactory effect” (73). The uncertainty of perspective that pervades Nadia’s and Saeed’s focalizations at various points in the novel is marked here, as we do not learn from either of them directly what they must already know—that the situation in their country is going “badly indeed.” Instead, we learn this at a removed level of representation, by reading their reception of international media. As Perfect argues, this reference to media flows reflects the implied (Western) reader’s position as one that is estranged from the experiences both of war and of refugeehood (1). However, the growing identification of readers with the protagonists also enables an estrangement of the reader’s position in the act of reading. In this way, reading itself becomes a form of encounter with the other.

Just like the evaluation of the war reality, the magic doors are also noted by the international news in the novel, thus establishing the equivalence of realist and magical literary codes typical of magical realist texts (Quayson). The novel’s emphasis on international news has a similar effect of establishing an equivalence of mediated and non-mediated experience in the lives of the protagonists. The novel’s use of magical realism and metafictional elements continues its dialogue with the post-colonial tradition of literature, but the doors are also connected to a specific, experiential kind of futurity linked to non-Western modernities. As Perfect notes, the novel emphasizes the complete darkness of the doors from which people emerge. The passage in the novel that has gained the most attention from literary critics describes one of the doors as “a rectangle of complete darkness—the heart of darkness” (Hamid 8). Both Perfect and Lagji discuss the meaning of this darkness, referring to Joseph Conrad’s novel and Chinua Achebe’s criticism of Heart of Darkness. Perfect proposes that the black holes do not signify the doors themselves but rather the threat to the nation state that they represent: the unpredictability of where people will emerge jeopardizes the border regimes, and therefore the integrity, of nation states. Perfect argues that Exit West thus entails a post-national vision in line with Giorgio Agamben’s criticism of the nation state (9–10).

The darkness within the doors is not fully resolved in Perfect’s analysis. He suggests that it metaphorically represents the despair and horror of the actual migration process, which the novel silences due to the instant transportation the magic doors provide. However, since the magic doors are specifically described as “rectangle[s] of complete darkness,” I read them as a metaphor of possibility and thus futurity that is connected to non-Western modern avantgarde art. The last exhibition of the Russian futurists in Saint Petersburg in 1915 showed a great number of paintings of black rectangles. The most famous of them is certainly “Black Square” by the avantgardist Kasimir Malevich. Why were Russian futurists at the beginning of the twentieth century painting black rectangles? In a letter to fellow artist Mikhail Matyushin, Malevich describes his painting as a zero degree of representation that expresses the freedom of art. For Malevich, the black square is “the embryo of all potentials” (qtd. in Milner 127). Exit West also associates the black rectangle with birth or rebirth when describing a man moving through the door: “with a final push he was through, trembling and sliding to the floor like a newborn foal” (Hamid 9). This nod to Russian futurist art complements Liliana Naydan’s analysis of the intermedial references to the digital artworks of Thierry Cohen, whose images of global cities in complete darkness (Cohen et al.) also point to the productive potential of “the possibilities of uncertainty and ambiguity” (Naydan 445).

Read in this way, the magic doors enable not only the freedom to begin again in a new place but also a subtle shift of stereotypes and colonial knowledge systems—the possibility to reconstruct our knowledge of the world and of each other. Following the description of the door as a “heart of darkness,” the intertextuality with Conrad and Achebe is continued by rewriting racist language using the strategy of subtle shifts of signification: “His eyes rolled terribly. Yes: terribly. Or perhaps not so terribly. Perhaps they merely glanced about him, at the woman, at the room” (Hamid 9). As Lagji argues, these tentative shifts of meaning not only revise Conradian racism but also “underscore the uncertainty that characterizes these moments of unexpected encounter” (7) as a realm to rethink prejudice, as a possibility of creating new empathy in the scene of encounter. This passage at the beginning of the novel already sets the tone for the ethical implications of Hamid’s project, which I read as a combination of Levinasian ethics of encounter and an understanding of futurity’s relation to freedom informed by Arendt. Due to its stress on ambiguity and uncertainty, Hamid’s novel also points to the fragility and liminality of hope while simultaneously asserting its indispensability in a time when the right to an open future is far from self-evident.

The magic doors—materializations of the borderless online exchange of ideas, images, feelings, and desires that Saeed, Nadia, and the reader are familiar with through social media—subvert the attempts to stem migration. The doors in Exit West enable refugees to transgress tough border regimes. According to the topos of utopian inversion, the text imagines the super-gentrified spaces of inner London as overrun by refugees. The reaction of the “natives,” as the English are called in the text in a postcolonial reversal, appears realistic and desperate: riots follow, cultural allegiances form between the newcomers, and the natives turn into a nationalist defense block. It is here, in London, where the new world and the old world coalesce and where Hamid’s text senses hope in the future, rather than loss, resentment, and despair. In scenes such as the one in which migrant children are playing in the boughs among the blossoms of the cherry trees on Palace Garden Terrace, the novel displays a poetics of tropicalizing, reminiscent of the iconic postcolonial tropicalizing of London in Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses but on a much more delicate scale that turns tropicalizing into humanizing:

And in these trees there were now dark bodies too, children who climbed and played among the boughs, like little monkeys, not because to be dark is to be monkey-like . . . but because people are monkeys who have forgotten to be monkeys[,] . . . but not, just then, these children[,] . . . and as bloodshed loomed they made these trees that were perhaps not intended to be climbed the stuff of a thousand fantasies.

(Hamid 138–39)

Again, Hamid uses racist language to subtly subvert it, asserting a common humanity that is paradoxically constructed via an estrangement from the human (“people are monkeys who have forgotten to be monkeys”). The utopian potential in Hamid’s novel can be found in such micro-narratives. In the tentativeness of the assignment of signifiers and their interpretation, Hamid’s novel creates a movement of language that lets the imagined events and scenes appear simultaneously concrete and abstract, at once current and distant. In fact, this very style senses the future as a form of anticipation that is not at all sure about itself, and not at all sure about what exactly it anticipates. Hoping for the future in Hamid’s novel includes a paradoxical element of desperation—because what it anticipates has as yet little shape other than the hope that there is going to be a future at all, despite all evidence to the contrary.

Strengthening an imaginary capability for sensing a hopeful future is exactly what the text does in its next plot-move—by imagining an unheard-of event. As the scene quoted above already hints at the looming “bloodshed,” tensions between migrants and the state power increase; a final battle in London is imminent. The novel anticipates and carefully builds up tension for an uneven battle between the migrants, who have formed allegiances, and “the natives,” who have technological militaristic superiority. However, the expected stand-off does not take place. Just “this once,” the narrator states, “decency prevailed” (166), again inverting the anticipated future in the novel and defying the reader’s expectations. The battle that does not take place can also be read as a metafictional comment: Is this battle, which was previously established in the narrative as likely and realistic, to be read in the magical or in the realist codes of the novel? The indeterminacy of these codes—in which the likelihood of the battle could be read as realist and its non-event as magical—stresses the ambiguity of hope for and fear of the future typical of the utopian genre.

Critics have discussed postcolonial reversal in Exit West⁵ as well as the novel’s recurrent topics of surveillance technology, global interconnectedness, and artificial intelligence (Perfect, Lagji, Naydan). Many critics have foregrounded the representation of digital communication technology in the novel. Naydan, for example, writes that “the numerous screens, barriers, and disconnections” that appear in the novel showcase “a duality or dividedness that shapes personal psychologies in the digital age” (440). However, I propose that while technology in the novel is often overwhelming and even scary, as in the oft-cited passage in which Nadia believes that she sees herself in a newscast on her mobile phone, it also points towards connection and even posthuman entanglement. As Claire Chambers argues, the novel articulates “new, posthuman modes of perception” (243) that highlight a human-nonhuman distribution of the agency of perception. This techno-organic co-construction of the world is also at the heart of the novel that I discuss below, Lagoon, and appears to be a key part of the new utopian idiom of sensing the future that I argue is expressed by both Lagoon and Exit West.

Technology enables Saeed and Nadia to connect when they are in lockdown in their apartments, separate from one another during the fighting in their hometown. They gaze at the stars together using an augmented reality app. The description of their encounter with the multi-ethnic mass of people in the refugee camp in Mykonos mixes technological and organic subjective perception: “these people were gathered around fires . . . and speaking in a cacophony that was the languages of the world, what one might hear if one were a communication satellite” (Hamid 106; emphasis added). The menacing aspect of technology is especially pronounced in the parts of the novel that take place in the United Kingdom—fitting for a state that embraced surveillance technology earlier than any other in the West. However, the greatest fear of the migrants who have taken over central London is not the natives’ surveillance balloons and drones but the combat robots “that walked and crawled like animals” (154). The evocation of creatureliness—of humans that are like monkeys and robots that are like animals—establishes relationships of similarity between the human and the non-human. The common creatureliness of humans and machines invokes the possibility of posthuman forms of conviviality and indivisibility— even though in London, the creatureliness of machines is menacing, and the robots are avatars of a cruel and aggressive state power. However, in California, where Saeed and Nadia move after London, the novel envisions an inclusive space of futurity. Here, the doors allow not only humans from various cultures but also artificial non-humans to forge a life together. Human musicians and intelligent robots form bands and convivially create a new form of music. Hamid plays on the history of jazz as a genre that connected the disadvantaged of the United States in the early twentieth century: Black Americans and Jews (Cooke and Horn 238, 317). In his future California, migrants and androids create the sound of a new possibility of humaneness, rather than humanness— the sound of a renewed attempt at conviviality. In the context of sensing the future, it is significant that Hamid chooses music as the language of this new conviviality: music is a mathematical and sensual form of expression that often evokes no clear referent outside of itself but instead elicits feeling. In California, again, robots of the unnamed institutions of control are animal-like. But whereas the scuttling robots of London are menacing, the tiny hummingbird-like surveillance drones of Marin are pitied by Saeed and Nadia for their artificial unintelligence. When one of them crashes into their lodging’s plastic sheet-door, Saeed and Nadia bury it—and their joking about giving the automaton a parting prayer is only half-sardonic (Hamid 205). As I mention above, Appadurai calls “the capacity to aspire” (289) one of the main functions that keep cultures alive. Exit West is a text full of this capacity, and it aspires to sense the future as a struggle for a renewed and ever-changing form of decency—a struggle for an inclusive humaneness in the face of increasing in-humaneness and un-humanness.

Daring to still imagine new forms of utopian inclusivity—a struggle for “making kin” (Haraway 2016) in a world that is increasingly, violently tribalized and compartmentalized despite the growing possibility of global communication and exchange—is what connects Hamid’s novel most strongly to the second text I consider, Okorafor’s Lagoon. Lagoon shares with Exit West the strategy of postcolonial reversal. If, as Appadurai writes, the future is “a cultural fact” (286–87) that has been created by the factual world-making of imperialist and capitalist history, which has made certain paths into the future possible and disabled others, both Hamid’s and Okorafor’s novels attempt to unmake this future and create alternative paths, alternative imaginaries in which newness appears in unconventional places.

The utopian alien invasion in Lagoon that will bring planetary change in this novel takes place not in one of the cosmopolitan centers canonized in an Anglophone Western imaginary but in Lagos, Nigeria. While sensing the future is lyrical in Exit West, Okorafor’s future sense is outright bombastic. Shape-shifting powerful aliens arrive from the sea, bring mythological creatures to life and turn animals into self-conscious monstrosities that narrate the stories of their transformation in vignettes (the most memorable of these is the story of an enlightened bat [Okorafor, Lagoon 223–25]). The triumphant change that the aliens enact finally awakens the spider god and reality-weaver Udide Okwanka, who lies buried beneath the city. Like the mighty Udide who “see[s] sound,” “feel[s] taste,” and “hear[s] touch” (291), the novel presents all-encompassing, non-hierarchical, and all-animating synesthesia as the only strategy of earthly survival. Lagoon might well be perceived as the novelistic mirror-image of Haraway’s theory of a situated post-human “making kin.” Okorafor’s novel depicts the “material-semiotic” (Haraway, Haraway Reader 2) construction of futurity as a realm of relationality. The most significant events of Okorafor’s novel take place on Lagos’ Bar Beach: “a place of mixing” (Okorafor, Lagoon 7).

Okorafor’s strategy of mixing magical realism and science fiction has created a newly invigorated form of Afrofuturism, not only in Lagoon but also in her other works engaging with post-apocalyptic themes.⁶ The aliens arrive out of the sea, and this trope, as Melody Jue argues, creates multiple interventions in both the tradition of science fiction and genres of African literature: it establishes a relationship to the tradition of the ocean as the ultimate alterity or cipher for difference in science fiction (Jue here refers to Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris [173]) as well as to Nigeria’s pantheon and cosmologies, like the water goddess Mami Wata, the artist-god Udide, or the trickster god Ijele, who all are reactivated by the aliens and take part in the change evoked by the alien invasion. The cosmic and the oceanic are also part of the “estrangement for the world” of Afrofuturism. For example, water-breathing mutants, born from pregnant African women thrown overboard on the Middle Passage, form the basis of the idiosyncratic mythology of the Black Chicago art and music collective Drexciya (Eshun 300), who estrange a traumatic cultural memory to turn it into a vision of the future. Increasing the semiotic richness of the oceanic trope, Lagoon also points to the ocean as a dominant signifier in Black Atlantic contexts—as an ambiguous marker of both separation and connection, of leaving and return.⁷

Okorafor connects this trope with the injuries to Nigeria’s critical zone as a future created by the actions of the past and present: the oil spills that, for decades, have devastated the soil of the Ogoni people’s land, the oil spills in the ocean, and the corruption and violence ensuing from Nigeria’s dependency on exported oil are the effects of petro-capitalism that the aliens are determined to change. In Lagoon, the future ecological catastrophe that follows from petro-capitalism is unmade by the utopian intervention of the aliens that are read against the oceanic myths of Nigerian cosmologies, a paradoxically familiar alterity. Thus, “Lagoon’s ocean is not simply a space of alterity but also an ancient and familiar element of Nigeria’s traditional cosmologies” (Jue 173). In a twist of the conventional “we come in peace” speech of alien invasion popularized in Western science fiction, Okorafor’s aliens speak directly to the historical experience of Nigeria in petro-capitalism: “‘WE DO NOT SEEK YOUR OIL OR YOUR OTHER RESOURCES,’ the woman was saying. ‘WE ARE HERE TO NURTURE YOUR WORLD. SO, WHAT WILL YOU DO?’” (Okorafor 128). This subversion of the alien invasion convention is remarkable for a few reasons: firstly, it points to the factual history of Nigeria as one of the destructive exploiters of its natural resources; secondly, it formulates an eco-utopian offer; and thirdly, it ends with an open call to the future that immediately demands agency: “[W]hat will you do?” (emphasis added). Rather than simply stating their good intentions, which in the conventions of alien invasion sci-fi is often revealed as deceit, the aliens in Lagoon open up a dialogue by posing a question, to which the human inhabitants of Lagos are urged to reply. Okorafor’s aliens resist an imaginary of African futures caught up in an overdetermined dystopic projection, as criticized by Kodwo Eshun (291–92).

Hugh O’Connell elaborates on “the relationship of the first contact narrative to colonial and neocolonial conquest as well as the slave trade” (292), showing how overdetermined the extraterrestrial trope is in the context of Afrofuturism. Okorafor’s use of the ocean and of Nigerian deities in the realm of science fiction also creates, as Miriam Pahl observes in regard to Okorafor’s earlier novel Who Fears Death (2010), a transgressive shift of topoi of the cultural memory of the Middle Passage, forced displacement, slavery, and colonialism. Eshun argues that African identities are associated with the past due to the traumatic history of the Middle Passage and colonialism. He holds that the dominance of trauma has been an impediment to constructing futurity in African and Black diasporic contexts in the later twentieth century: “Because the practice of countermemory defined itself as an ethical commitment to history, the dead, and the forgotten, the manufacture of conceptual tools that could analyze and assemble counterfutures was looked upon with suspicion, wariness and hostility” (288). In discourses on identity, the ocean marks the traumatic history of the Middle Passage, and the temporalities of the knowledge systems of African cultures are represented as not partaking in the temporalities of modernity.

Pahl argues that because of their specific mix of genres, Okorafor’s fictions simultaneously partake in the movement of modernity and are outside, or rather, beside it. The combination of magical realism and science fiction has the effect of subverting representations of African cultures in theory and philosophy (209). By using this strategy of generic mixing, Okorafor creates futurity from the adaptation of cultural memory, through which a new imaginary of the past for the future becomes possible: a collective imaginary that is fed by both memory and anticipation. The semiotic richness and liveliness of Lagoon’s ocean contrasts the role of the ocean in Black Atlantic countermemory as a space of death.⁸

While its conceptual saturation might make Okorafor’s work appear overly programmatic, the text of Lagoon does not read like program-matic fiction. The novel can be firmly situated in popular fiction, with a fast-paced plot, a clear villain in the shape of a zealous and corrupt Christian priest, and many cinematic and action-packed scenes, starting from the “sonic boom” or “Moom!” (Okorafor, Lagoon 3) that marks the arrival of the aliens in the prologue. Apart from the mixing of the idioms of standard English, Igbo, and Pidgin English in the novel, its language makes heavy use of the onomatopoetic expressions known as sound effects in comics. Recurrent exclamations such as “BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM!” (124), “BOOM!” (128), or “Plash!^” (130) strengthen the novel’s evocation of popular visual and audiovisual media, such as comics or superhero movies, while simultaneously heightening the affective charge of the text, in which human, animal, and spiritual beings experience change sensually, as vibrations or shifts. Therefore, in Lagoon the idea of sensing the future becomes especially palpable. Sensing the future appears as an affective as much as intellectual operation that defies singularized semiotic referentiality. O’Connell proposes to read the aliens of Okorafor’s fiction as “event” in the meaning of Alain Badiou’s conception of the term: “as that which is alien, unknowable, or unlocatable to the ideology of the contemporary world-system” (309). This reading is connected to a poetics—and ethics—of encounter with the other. It also resonates with the gestures that Exit West makes, through the dark rectangles of the magic doors, to the futurism of the avantgarde—as the “embryo of all potentials” (Milner 172) of other futures and freedoms, outside of future capitalist industries.

III. Conclusion

The activists of Extinction Rebellion remind us in their manifestos that we are living in a time of emergency, just as much as our demonstrating children shout at us that we are stealing their futures due to our incapacity to counteract ecological catastrophe. A new virus spreads through the globalized world in a matter of weeks, putting lives, economies, and social structures in turmoil for years. More likely than not, the world is breaking on our watch. At the same time, cultural historians from the 1970s onwards have increasingly dismissed the future as unable to offer a valuable horizon of expectation: “squeezed between . . . the category of historical memory and a perpetual present, the future [is] a shrinking horizon” (Andersson 16).

However, future making is a vital aspect of world making. If Frederic Jameson had been right in his assertion that all utopias are dead, then world making would also be dead—and with it fiction as a potent form of world making. This is not the case, as my discussion of Hamid’s and Okorafor’s novels shows. People have not only started to think about the future as planetary but are also increasingly experiencing it as such. Texts like Exit West and Lagoon search for a poetics of global counterfuturity. If countermemory is a strategy to reappraise a silenced past, counterfuturity could likewise establish a political use of temporality, what Eshun calls “a chronopolitical act” (292). Searching for literary expressions of anticipation, sensing the future is a necessary part of the pressing task to put a stronger emphasis on conceptualizing futurity as a field of cultural production. While the two novels I discuss are vastly different in their textual strategies and world making, they both present trajectories towards a future of relationality, even when they speak of trauma. The acknowledgement of traumatic pasts thus becomes a part of utopia as a practice, as a way of both thinking and experiencing the future through a strategy of encounter and an Arendtian “estrangement for the world.”

Hamid’s migrants and Okorafor’s cosmically changed Lagos, with its “animals, plant and spirit” people (backcover description of Lagoon), are catalysts for hopeful ways of sensing the future because they increase, rather than push back, diversity, entanglement, and an inversion of hierarchies. These fictions employ a key strategy of making the reader feel others—and the other—thus revealing a contiguity to Levinas’ ethics that is based on an open, future encounter with the other. Okorafor’s synesthetic way to rediscover the future and the utopian poetics of connection in Hamid’s novel have ethical implications. Exit West and Lagoon stress “the absolute necessity of the future as a category and imperative of action” (Andersson 16). Their experiments with and mixtures of genres, such as the link between Nigerian and Black Atlantic systems of knowledge and sci-fi in Lagoon and the poetic entanglement of fantastic tropes, emotional realism, and posthuman creatureliness in Exit West, offer a response to Amitav Ghosh’s criticism of modern realist fiction as having failed to develop an imaginary of climate change (8–11). Yet these texts also testify to the continued ability of fictional narratives to sense the future. Fitting the utopian impulse of inversion, catalysts for imagining the future with hope might come from historically marginalized places, as in the globalist yet situated settings of Hamid’s and Okorafor’s novels.

While we might need to step across the borders of humanism and humanity in order to recover futurity and anticipation in the complex ethical entanglements of a posthuman age, we might need to carry with us the notion of the humane, and with it, the notion of learning to create the future through sensing others and the other, of learning to consider (post)human moral affects, which might shift the way we use language to experience the future in fictional texts. If there is one common idea in the forms of anticipation that the two novels present, it is that if we want to recover the future, we will first have to reshape encounter as a strategy. We will also have to reconceptualize futurity, as Arendt envisions it, as a right that is a fundamental prerequisite of agency and freedom.