Speculative Becoming: Octavia Butler’s Kindred and the Afrofuturist (Re)imagining of Technological Futures

As technological transformation continues to shape global politics, International Relations (IR) scholars must confront urgent questions about how technological futures are imagined and how these may be unsettlingly positioned to elide questions of race and inequality. This article draws on concepts from Afrofuturism to tease out these anxieties by querying the intersections of race, technology, and futurity. Through a close reading of Octavia Butler’s Kindred , this article argues that Afrofuturist speculative fiction provides essential theoretical resources for (re) imagining technological futures grounded in Black radical traditions. This article demonstrates the epistemological potential of speculative fiction specifically through its critique of temporality, emphasis on Black embodiment for discerning the limits of a posthumanist imagination, and a critical interrogation of cyborg theory that challenges dominant narratives of technological hybridity. Contributing to critical IR scholarship, this article illustrates how Afrofuturist thought offers sophisticated theoretical frameworks from which to analyse our present entanglements with technology.