[Editor's Note: This article continues the conversation on extractivism in SF, that began with the Strange Horizons special issue on extractivism, in September 2022.]

Rosewater

At first glance, Tade Thompson’s trilogy of novels chronicling an alien invasion in Nigeria may not appear to deal with extractivism.[1] The aliens are not removing earth’s resources to take back to their homeworld. In fact, their homeworld no longer exists in a liveable form. So even though the so-called Homians have sent probes across space searching for resource-rich planets to colonize, they do not plan to board spaceships following the probes to the planet, expand their empire, or export the wealth of the colonies back to the metropole.[2]

Instead, Thompson’s novels put an important spin on traditional colonial narratives in science fiction: the Homians are never physically going to arrive to take over. They can’t. They decimated their own planet so thoroughly that they could no longer survive as a species. In a form of mass suicide, they uploaded their consciousnesses to a quantum server to await a suitable planet—that is, one that includes suitable bodies. In Thompson’s narration, the colonizing force takes control of resources by taking over human bodies, slowly and inexorably changing human DNA until each body is fully alien and thus readied for a Homian consciousness to be downloaded into it. Only then, after acquiring a body, can the aliens start mining the resources of this “new” world. I call what Thompson offers us through the Homian invasion reverse extractivism. 

If Extractivism is Colonial, Reverse Extractivism is Neocolonial

Reverse extractivism is a colonial fever-dream, one that the reveals the colonist’s ultimate desires through its uncanny logics.[3] If extractivism is empire’s removal of resources from the periphery without industrial development or fair compensation,[4] reverse extractivism is the imbrication of the colonizer into the very being of the colonized, such that resources don’t need to be removed to be exploited for the benefit of empire.

Through reverse extractivism, a disembodied subject can download himself into any location and have all the resources he desires, to use and misuse, without interference from pesky Indigenous peoples.[5] Reverse extractivism imports the colonizer into the very body of the colonized, so that removal of resources becomes unnecessary for profit and domination. This is not an invasion narrative that uses war to dominate. In Thompson’s trilogy, most Nigerians don’t know that colonization is occurring. Many welcome the effects of the changes in their DNA, and even seek them out. In doing so, the humans speed their own transition into becoming fully alien before even realizing they’ve lost anything. This alien takeover analogizes the operations of neocolonialism that Frantz Fanon identified, whereby resource extraction continues because “the national bourgeoisie identifies with the Western bourgeoisie, from whom it has learnt its lessons.”[6]  If extractivism is the goal of colonialism, reverse extractivism becomes the other side of the coin under neocolonialism. Reverse extractivism allows for empire to maintain resource control even after the official end to colonial governance.  The endgame of reverse extractivism is for colonized people to cease to exist, erased by colonizers for the capitalistic benefit of empire.

Frantz Fanon

I was inspired to conceive of reverse extractivism after reading David M. Higgins’ book on reverse colonization. Higgins explains reverse colonization as “invit[ing] audiences who are most often the beneficiaries of empire to imagine what it feels like to be on the receiving end of imperial conquest,” by staging stories where white Westerners (often as a universal stand-in for humanity writ large) are the victims of an alien invasion.[7] These narratives posing white Westerners as victims of colonization rather than its perpetrators started showing up after a crisis in colonial identity. As Higgins points out, after the 1960s, “it became overwhelmingly uncool to be a conqueror or colonizer.”[8] The violence of colonization had become so obvious and public that even white Westerners could no longer pretend it was a good thing. But that left us in a bind.[9] Many white Westerners had built their entire national identities on a selective memory around colonization,[10] and having it so publicly recognized as evil shook those identities to the core. The contradictions between colonial violence and fantasies of innocence propelled the need to figure out another way to maintain a sense of self. Here comes reverse colonialism to save the day: in this abstracted form of colonization, white Westerners get to identify with the colonized, allowing an escape into innocence (“We’re the Indigenous people, fighting against the destruction of our way of life!” a la Avatar) and also a projection of their own violence onto a feared other (“The evil aliens are coming to get us!” ala Independence Day).[11]

Reverse extractivism isn’t the same as reverse colonization, but it arises from a similar crisis in colonial logics. If white Westerners can no longer invade other geographic spaces physically, how can we still control their resources? Maintaining colonial control requires what Kate Lockwood Harris and I have elsewhere termed “labile imperialism,” empire’s ability to shift form to recuperate power post-crisis.[12] For instance, after African countries began to gain independence, colonial logics shifted to focus on what Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o narrated as colonization of the mind and Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni has more recently described in terms of epistemic injustice.[13] As these and other thinkers recognize, when colonial control became untenable, empire shifted toward neocolonial domination.

In The Wormwood Trilogy, Tade Thompson uses reverse extractivism to analogize the slow creep of neocolonial domination that often supports and undergirds contemporary material extractivism. That is, the ability to steal material resources in the post-colonial period goes hand-in-hand with ways of thinking that make resource removal seem permissible, and even desired. In our contemporary world, reverse extractivism shows up metaphorically, but with no less material results. Rather than extracting natural resources, reverse extractivism attempts to remove Indigenous people’s selfhood. Neocolonial logics rely on an absenting of bodies in the production of knowledge so that white Westerners can purport our understandings as universal. But to hold onto this fiction of universal knowledge, other ways of knowing—and particularly for our purposes in this essay, African ways of knowing—must be obscured and erased. This erasure is made to seem beneficial through connection between neocolonial ways of knowing and material resource extraction—the promise that if you epistemically “buy in” to neocolonial structures of global neoliberal capitalism, you will be able to financially “succeed.”[14] Reverse extractivism thus analogizes the way that Western epistemologies erase alternative knowledges, purport disembodied universality, and make themselves seem necessary to advancement in capitalist society. Here, I focus on two themes in Thompson’s trilogy that draw parallels between the reverse extractivism in the novels and necolonialism in contemporary life: how it extends from colonial self-destruction and how it relies on epistemic injustice.

Reverse Extractivism Extends from Self-Destruction

Neocolonial logics induce colonizers to first self-destruct, by devastating both their own homes and bodies, before locating reverse extractivism as a solution to their self-inflicted woes. In The Wormwood Trilogy, the Homians self-destruct in two ways: through self-inflicted extractivism, decimating their own home planet so thoroughly that it is no longer habitable, and then, left with no resources to support themselves, killing their own bodies while keeping their consciousnesses stored in a disembodied state. Both of these forms of destruction—environment and bodies—map onto facets of neocolonialism today.

The Homians’ destruction of their planet reflects the environmental degradation driven by real-world neocolonial logics. As Thompson explains in an interview, the Homians “are a reflection of us”:

The Homians themselves actually represent the human race. They represent the end of what we’ve done to ourselves, and what we’re doing to ourselves now. They are a reflection of us. They are what we will become if we become technologically advanced but can’t keep our planet alive. And we can’t get our philosophy right. And we can’t decide on what’s the best way to save ourselves…The Homians actually represent the endpoint of the human race.[15]

The Homians decimated their homeworld to the point where continued existence on it became completely untenable. As Thompson notes, humanity is set on this same extractivist course if “we can’t get our philosophy right.” Specifically, neocolonial logics are part of what continues to steer human life and philosophy away from the “right” direction, maintaining instead levels of resource use and waste production that the planet is already unable to sustain.

Even in the face of its own self-destruction, neocolonialism continues guiding us in the wrong direction. This may seem illogical: why would a system continue on a pathway toward annihilation? As I have written elsewhere, this is part of the reason colonialism and neocolonialism send people continually searching for “frontiers”: “The right to a ‘frontier’ space acts as a means of reinvigorating dominant power structures that are perceived to be in crisis.”[16] Colonists, new or old, are perpetually ready to jump off the ship we ourselves have run into the ground, and find a “frontier” space—a tabula rasa—where we can try to use the same logics and hope for different results.[17] In The Rosewater Redemption, the primary Homian representative, Koriko, who was the first to download into a body in Rosewater after the DNA was turned fully alien, reflects while standing outside in the morning dew, “This is what she has always wanted—not the human part; her Homian self—a world unblighted by toxins and unbridled industry. There are no foreign drones in the air. The Nigerians have learned to stop sending them.”[18] Here, Koriko highlights neocolonial logics in a few ways: how the Homians destroyed their previous world through “toxins and unbridled industry”; how they see this new one as “unblighted”; and yet that the erasure of Indigenous Nigerian occupants is not complete—though she may pretend that the air here is clear, it’s just because the Nigerians are tired of having their drones shot down. It is simply a reprieve in their resistance, but she tries to narrate it as an emptiness.

So far, this all lines up with extractivist logics. Reverse extractivism is then what secures the ability to continue extracting resources, after logically an end should already have been reached. That is, Homian self-destruction goes beyond their planet; they also destroyed themselves. Killing their own bodies, they left only imprints of their memories stored in a quantum database. These imprints have waited for trillions of years for new hosts. When the alien probe, Wormwood, makes its home in what would come to be known as Rosewater, it begins healing human bodies and even resurrecting the newly dead—preparing them to receive Homian consciousnesses. Reverse extractivism is what allows the aliens to continue resource misuse, long after their own planet is gone.

Once the leadership of Rosewater realizes what is happening, they make a deal with the Homians: take the reanimated dead, and leave the rest of us alone. But the plan triggers virulent objections, particularly from Hannah Jacques, wife of Rosewater’s mayor, who claims the reanimates are not empty vessels. The self is embodied, she says. The reanimates are still people. It is the Homians who are not.

Savvy about spreading her message, Hannah Jacques goes on TV:

Personhood cannot be limited to a person’s memories. We are to believe that in death the reanimates lose their selves, and when resurrected by Wormwood, they are just bodies, biological vessels waiting to be filled by alien presences. It’s like a nightmare built by the ghost of John Locke. You’ve got these stupid but technologically advanced aliens who stories the memories of their people and then murdered them. Locke would of course say the memories are the people, so each one, stored on a server trillions of light years away, is still alive in that sense. He would also say the reanimates are not alive as they appear to have no memory of their previous lives. The use of reanimate bodies as hosts for Homian dead would be as easy and ethically challenging as putting on clothes from a charity shop. In actual fact, using reanimates is salting the wounds of the bereaved…I consider the bodies into which these memories are inserted to be people. Humanity is not just about memories. Selfhood is embodied, and a reanimated Hannah Jacques is still Hannah Jacques, just like a Hannah Jacques with dementia is still Hannah Jacques.[19]

The Homians mass suicide is “a type of disembodiment that is only possible within colonial mentalities that view the self as separable from the body, and one which depended upon taking over the bodies of others.”[20] This colonial mentality corrupts relationships to bodies. Rather than understanding them as parts of the self, inextricable, the body becomes merely another thing to be used within networks of domination. It becomes a tool, a toy—an object.

Through this mentality, colonizers erode our very selves. Reverse extractivism—the erasure of Indigenous culture and being—is only thinkable because colonizers have already poisoned and numbed themselves to injustice. Thompson’s trilogy makes literal a sense of disembodiment that has long been found within colonial and neocolonial logics. As I have elsewhere written, “Colonizers think they can be disembodied, that their personhood exists separate from their bodies, because of the norms that have universalized whiteness, cismasculinity, and Western epistemologies. Those invisible within colonial structures do not recognize their bodies as having bearing on their selfhood.”[21] We see this in Donna Haraway’s description of how white, Western cisheteromasculinity insists on writing with a view from nowhere, as if their statements are universally true and context holds no bearing on their argumentation.[22] We see it in the way whiteness tries to render itself invisible, an assumed norm against which everything else must be judged.[23] Each of these logics corrodes embodiment, rendering us a little less human.

The end of this disembodiment is an inability to recognize humanity. The body becomes just a thing, and the mind the only register of humanness—but only if it reflects white, Western ways of thought. This is the perspective that allows for the denigration of Blackness, for the Black body to be seen as “a tool, a technology that serve[s]…for the utility of White self-conception.”[24] As James Baldwin described it, supporting colonization turns white Westerners into “moral monsters” who “have deluded themselves for so long that they really don’t think I’m human.”[25] Under neocolonial logics, why not give the reanimates to the Homians? They’re just bodies, not selves. They’re not really human. Here we see another reflection of the way Fanon and Ngũgĩ narrate the continuance of colonial logics in the minds of African subjects, particularly those in power—Rosewater’s Mayor Jack Jacques cedes the reanimates to the aliens in order maintain power over Rosewater and its resources. Reverse extractivism is the way extractivism is maintained.

Reverse Extractivism Relies on Epistemic Injustice

But if this logic of separating bodies and selves doesn’t hold complete sway, the reverse extractivism plan starts to fall apart. This is why Hannah Jacques’ speech on air is such a threat to the governance of her husband. Once people start to think differently, to see the reanimate bodies as still human, they’re no longer willing to accept the compromise with the Homians. They’re no longer willing to allow for the continuation of the downloads. To stay in power, reverse extractivism depends on obscuring alternative ways of knowing the world.

When one way of knowing the world is promoted as the only way of knowing the world, this is epistemic injustice. Epistemic injustice describes how neocolonialism erodes cultural mores and ways of being by constantly promoting white, Western lifestyles as universal aspirations. It underlies why global development is envisioned in only a linear fashion, placing Western infrastructures and technologies as the presumed goal and “condemning the disempowered to live in the past.”[26] And it is part of what convinces people to desire the very structures that are killing them. Epistemic injustice is what allows for the Indigenous erasure of reverse extractivism.

In the novels, Thompson analogizes this through the slow transformation of humans into aliens—and in how the mechanisms that allow the transformation are often things those in the city of Rosewater initially think they want. Near the beginning of Rosewater, Kaaro, the book’s narrator, describes how once a year the alien dome in the middle of the city opens:

Every year, though, the biodome opens for twenty or thirty minutes in the south, near the Kehinde area. Everyone in the vicinity of the opening is cured of all physical and some mental ailments. It is also well known and documented that the outcome is not always good, even if diseases are abolished. There are reconstructions that go wrong, as if the blueprints are warped. Nobody knows why this happens.[27]

Even with the chance of faulty healing, when the dome opens, Kaaro describes, “There are, by my estimate, thousands of people. They are of all colours and creeds: black Nigerians, Arabs, Japanese, Pakistani, Persians, white Europeans and a mishmash of others. All hope to be healed or changed in some specific way.”[28] Beyond those that gather at the base of the dome, others rent flats to watch and breathe in traces from the nearby air. As one of Kaaro’s colleagues puts it before the Opening, “All of Rosewater will be there.”[29]

This healing, we later find out, is one of the main mechanisms for transforming humans into aliens through changing their DNA. Masquerading as a gift, as something that should be desired, the aliens lure humans into actively seeking out the process of their own colonization. As Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o argues, colonialism’s “most important area of domination was the mental universe of the colonized, the control, through culture, of how people perceived themselves and their relationships to the world.”[30] By viewing their relationship to the dome as one in which humans receive a gift, it obscures the nagging sense that there’s still something suspicious about an alien dome settling in the middle of their countryside.

Reverse extractivism counts on hiding those knowledges that remind people of the problems with colonialism—and of the existence of colonialism itself.[31] The Opening can be perceived as something worth celebrating only if you do not know (or are made to forget) that it is an alien presence here to wipe out Indigenous life and claim the land and resources for itself. Later the process of colonial forgetting is even clearer: offering reanimates to the Homians may keep them from erasing personalities and stealing living bodies for the moment, but it still enables colonization. The only way to maintain a fiction of safety is to forget that colonization continues to advance.

But neocolonialism can never fully hide colonial structures from view. Even in the healing offered by the dome, there are hints that something’s not right: “reconstructions that go wrong,” as Kaaro notes. Similarly, the Homian downloads into human bodies are not quite right. Lora, an android, can always tell something is off about them:

There is a constant, fine tremor to the hands, not marked enough to affect their motor skills or dexterity, but Lora has seen it in all of them. If you talk to a Homian for longer than five minutes, the eyes seem to lose synchronicity and drift apart, only to rapidly correct themselves as if they are aware of it. Every last one of them has a mild green tinge to the whites of the eyes, like jaundice. Lora finds it interesting that these changes are not seen in reanimates.[32]

The reanimate bodies, ultimately, are still human. Those bodies being slowly changed to alien DNA are still human. It is not until a Homian downloads into them that they display these hints of dysfunction. If we look closely, the logics of Homian disembodiment don’t hold up. These tremors remind us that consciousnesses are contextual; we are not who we are without the context that forms us. When taken and abruptly inserted into an entirely different body, context, place, and time, the self cannot simply remain the same. The subtle differences produced in reverse extractivist processes are things that neocolonial logics can’t erase.

Reverse Extractivism Sows the Seeds of its Own Destruction

The idea of a disembodied self is a lie peddled by neocolonial logics in order to maintain dominance. The reality is, even the Homians cannot actually live or act without bodies. The probe, Wormwood, needs a human body to act as a host in order to maintain itself. The alien consciousnesses, lightyears away on their quantum server, do not seem to really live or progress in the trillions of years they exist there. This is implied in the way Koriko reacts when Rosewater leadership offers the reanimates to the aliens. “I need to consult on this,” she says, “You’re asking me to alter a fundamental plan agreed aeons ago.”[33] That there has been no change whatsoever to the colonization plan in literal aeons suggests that the aliens are in a sort of stasis in their servers. The consciousnesses do not act without embodied interaction. Rather, they simply wait. Wait for bodies to become available.

And when those bodies do become available, the process of downloading into them is not as easy as expected. Beyond the small inconsistencies noted by Lora above, there are other major problems. As one of the Nigerian resistance fighters explicates, Homians react in four different ways to reembodiment:

Squatters are your basic Homians in a human reanimate body. They tend to stay in the Honeycomb or live quiet if eccentric lives. Passers you’ve met already. They try to pass as human and integrate. They’re not harmful, just irritating. There are sleepers, who are Homians who just seem overwhelmed by it all and spend their time catatonic or asleep, also in the Honeycomb. Synners are the ones you need to be careful of. They love to transgress and they treat humans like they’re not real.[34]

Later, a fifth category is revealed: those who are so fundamentally unable to handle the transfer that they go mad and must be restrained. I want to particularly highlight the synners, here. Synners kill humans—and themselves—indiscriminately, as if making the biggest explosion is a type of game. Because to them, it is. Why not? If colonial disembodiment makes others out to not be people, but just bodies, tools for your own regeneration, why not kill them? If you will just be redownloaded into another body when the one you’re using dies, why not blow yourself up in the process? Synners take reverse extractivist logics to an extreme: If bodies are only things to be used, it doesn’t matter what happens to them. Blow it up and you’ll get a tabula rasa to start again.

Through these different Homian reactions, Thompson reminds us that there is a “messiness” to colonization.[35] It is never clean, simple, or finalized. Because of this, there are always ways to resist it. Yes, the aliens have already transformed some of everyone’s DNA to be alien. No, that cannot be reversed. But that doesn’t mean the people of Rosewater aren’t still human. As Godfried Asante and I describe elsewhere, this is analogous to the African post-colonial condition, where globalizing Western influences cannot be separated from contemporary African life.[36] It doesn’t make people less African. But it does give them insight into neocolonial structures and how they operate. In fact, Asante argues that this messy overlap of colonial legacies, neocolonial structures, and African life allows for Africans to use “queerly ambivalent” strategies to maneuver around and against domination from within, simultaneously using and undermining the structure.[37] In The Wormwood Trilogy, it’s being part-alien and connected to the very Homian network used to download into human bodies that eventually allows for the human resistance to stop the Homian invasion.[38] They’re part of the system, but see it from a different perspective. It gives them the insight to turn the colonial structure against itself.

Reverse extractivism thus sows the seeds of its own destruction. The inconsistencies in neocolonial logics are there, if we look for them. When thought is purported as universal, who is being ignored? When embodied context is absented from discussion, whose perspective is being normalized? When bodies are thought of as tools, what violences are being condoned? The epistemic injustice and self-destruction that go hand-in-hand with reverse extractivism have material effects. That is, the ways we think and what we are willing to allow—or support—are part of what enables the continual stealing of resources from African and other Indigenous peoples and lands. By understanding reverse extractivism, we can find alternative ways of thinking that challenge the material injustices of extractivism. Look to the tremors, the dysfunction, the holes in the system. How can we shift perspective, see it in alternative ways? And perhaps even, someday, turn it against itself?

Jenna Hanchey

[1] Tade Thompson, Rosewater (New York: Orbit, 2016); The Rosewater Insurrection (New York: Orbit, 2019); The Rosewater Redemption (New York: Orbit, 2019).

[2] For definitional work on extractivism in science fiction, see: Gautam Bhatia, “Foreword: A War of Seeing,” Strange Horizons, September 26, 2022; Emma Johanna Puranen, “The Ethics of Extractivism in Science Fiction,” Strange Horizons, September 26, 2022.

[3] Drawing from Carina Brand, we might say it’s an expression of the “extractive unconscious,” “imagining resource extraction taken to its logical or illogical limits” by making literal how neocolonialism purports a disembodied and universal subject. Carina Brand, “The Extractive Unconscious in Science Fiction: A Saga of Concrete and Gas,” Strange Horizons, September 26, 2022.

[4] Gautam Bhatia, “Foreword: A Way of Seeing,” Strange Horizons, September 26, 2022.

[5] I use “he” here purposefully, as cisheterosexual masculinity is also key to being able to consider oneself a disembodied and therefore “universal” subject, along with whiteness and Westerncentrism.

[6] Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, translated by Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1963), p. 153.

[7] David M. Higgins, Reverse Colonization: Science Fiction, Imperial Fantasy, and Alt-Victimhood (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2021), p. 1.

[8] Higgins, Reverse Colonization, p. 3.

[9] Here, I use “we” and “us” when referring to white Western subjects and our mindsets as a means of recognizing that I as a white Westerner, even though I try to think critically about these logics, cannot fully escape them.

[10] For instance, scholars describes how US identity is fundamentally dependent on a structural forgetting of their own genocidal colonialism against Indigenous peoples. See: Renée L. Bergland, The National Uncanny: Indian Ghosts and American Subjects (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College, 2000); Kent A. Ono, Contemporary Media Cultures and the Remnants of a Colonial Past (New York: Peter Lang, 2009).

[11] The idea that evil aliens are coming to take over is not uniquely found in Western science fiction, but it does a hold a particular ideological importance there. Rather than acting as a way of examining the fallout of colonization for the colonized, Western alien invasion narratives typically act as a means of avoiding responsibility as colonizers by equating themselves with the colonized.

[12] Kate Lockwood Harris and Jenna N. Hanchey, “(De)stabilizing Sexual Violence Discourse: Masculinization of Victimhood, Organizational Blame, and Labile Imperialism,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 11, no. 4 (2014): p. 337.

[13] Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (Portsmouth: Heinemann, 1986); Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Epistemic Freedom in Africa: Deprovincilization and Decolonization (New York: Routledge, 2018).

[14] For a detailed explanation of this and the relation to economic structures post-independence, see: Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, p. 148-205.

[15] Hopeton Hay Podcasts, “Interview with Tade Thompson about His Afrofuturist Science Fiction Novels,” Podomatic. Dec. 15, 2019. https://www.podomatic.com/podcasts/kazibookreview/episodes/2019-12-15T04_34_42-08_00

[16] Jenna N. Hanchey, “Catastrophe Colonialism: Global Disaster Films and the White Right to Migrate,” Journal of International and Intercultural Communication (OnlineFirst).

[17] Of course, such spaces are never actually “clean slates,” and repeating colonial logics simply reiterates colonial problems. Greg Grandin, “Empire’s Ruins: Detroit to the Amazon,” in Imperial Debris: On Ruins and Ruination, ed. Ann Laura Stoler (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013), pp. 115-130; Hanchey, “Catastrophe Colonialism.”

[18] Thompson, The Rosewater Redemption, p. 3.

[19] Thompson, The Rosewater Redemption, pp. 14-15.

[20] Jenna N. Hanchey, “‘The Self is Embodied’: Reading Queer and Trans Africanfuturism in The Wormwood Trilogy,” Journal of International and Intercultural Communication 14, no. 4 (2021): p. 331.

[21] Hanchey, “‘The Self is Embodied,’” pp. 328-329.

[22] Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies 14 (1988): pp. 575–599.

[23] Thomas Nakayama and Robert Krizek, “Whiteness: A Strategic Rhetoric,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 81, no. 3 (1995): pp. 291-319.

[24] Armond R. Towns, “Black ‘Matter’ Lives,” Women’s Studies in Communication 41, no. 4 (2018): p. 354, emphasis removed.

[25] James Baldwin, quoted in Raoul Peck, dir., I am Not Your Negro (New York: Vintage International, 2017): p. 39. Companion book to the documentary film, based on texts by James Baldwin.

[26] Kodwo Eshun, “Further Considerations on Afrofuturism,” CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 2 (2003): p. 289.

[27] Thompson, Rosewater, p. 9.

[28] Thompson, Rosewater, pp. 11-12.

[29] Thompson, Rosewater, p. 5.

[30] Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Decolonising the Mind, p. 16.

[31] Ono, Contemporary Media Culture, pp. 2-3.

[32] Thompson, The Rosewater Redemption, p. 51.

[33] Thompson, The Rosewater Insurrection, p. 363.

[34] Thompson, The Rosewater Redemption, p. 74.

[35] Hopeton Hay Podcasts, “Interview with Tade Thompson.”

[36] Jenna N. Hanchey and Godfried Asante, “‘How to Save the World from Aliens, Yet Keep Their Infrastructure’: Repurposing the ‘Master’s House’ in The Wormwood Trilogy,” Feminist Africa 2, no. 2 (2021): pp. 11-28.

[37] Godfried Asante, “‘Queerly Ambivalent’: Navigating Global and Local Normativities in Postcolonial Ghana,” in Queer Intercultural Communication: The Intersectional Politics of Belonging in and across Difference, eds. Shinsuke Eguchi and Bernadette Marie Calafell (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield), pp. 157-176.

[38] For more on this, see Hanchey and Asante, “‘How to Save the World from Aliens.’”

Credits:

Editor: Gautam Bhatia

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