‘I was worlds’: meditations on diplomatic becomings and dissensual friendship

‘The fictitious world of novels, which is only by convention less real than our own,’ provides us with multiple diplomatic images, imaginaries, and imaginations (Constantinou 1996). This world of literary imaginations also reveals the avowed and unavowed fictions that animate our ideas of diplomacy, community, the home, the body, humanity, and more-than-human beings. Through a reading of the imaginative and speculative diplomatic worlds in Nnedi Okorafor's Africanfuturistic Binti trilogy alongside V.Y. Mudimbe's meditations on alterity politics, this text-mediated meditation on dissensual friendships raises questions about diplomacy and hospitality. It maps instances of dissensual friendship that illustrate how some hospitalities (cultures of the home) can be extended or betrayed through ideals of humanity, disciplinary knowledge, and their related idea of Africa.