Artistic Representation of the Past in Afrofuturist Novels from Nigeria and the United States

This study focuses on the artistic strategies of representing historical past in two Afrofuturist novels: «Kindred» by Octavia Butler and «War Girls» by Tochi Onyebuchi. The author examines how these texts, rooted in distinct geographical and cultural contexts—African American and Nigerian—conceptualize the past as a constituent of collective memory, historical trauma, and cultural identity. Special attention is paid to the integration of the past into the structure of speculative fiction, its narrative functions, and its role in shaping future imaginaries. The comparison of the two novels reveals both shared tendencies within Afrofuturist writing and region-specific approaches to historical material and postcolonial or discriminatory experiences. The research employs comparative literary analysis, narratological tools, and the methodology of Postcolonial Studies. An anthropological perspective is applied to account for localized practices of collective memory, cultural coding, and divergences in historical narratives in Nigeria and the United States. The theoretical framework is informed by contemporary Afrofuturist scholarship. The past is interpreted as a narrative-generative element within the texts. This article presents the first comparative analysis in Russian literary studies of past representation in Afrofuturist fiction from Nigeria and the United States. It identifies a key distinction: in the U.S. Afrofuturist tradition, the past is portrayed as trauma requiring emotional reconstruction, whereas in the Nigerian tradition, it emerges as a cyclical history necessitating caution and reinterpretation. The study delineates divergent narrative strategies—from direct temporal immersion in the history of slavery (U.S.) to allusive transpositions of civil war into a futuristic setting (Nigeria). It demonstrates that speculative fiction operates in both contexts as a tool for cultural and political reflection. The findings contribute to refining the conceptual apparatus of Afrofuturist criticism and open new directions for Afrofuturist research within Russian humanities.

Afrofuturism, Africanfuturism, Nigeria, U.S., narrative memory, postcolonial novel, represenatation of the Past, Comparative Literary Studies, sankofa, Black futurism