ABSTRACT
Afrocyberpunk cinema provides a transnational perspective on cyberpunk that shifts the genre's attention to a repeatedly neglected continent and peoples that often haunt traditional cyberpunk media: Africa and the African diaspora. Africa has been a spectral absence in cyberpunk, a continent that exists as rarely anything more than a barely-glimpsed, dark, and violent zone. Afrocyberpunk, as counternarrative, defies the trend of this kind of spectral disappearance by renegotiating and re-appropriating cyberpunk ideas and imagery. For example, Neill Blomkamp's work—Tetra Vaal (2004), Alive in Joburg (2006), Tempbot (2006), District 9 (2009), and Elysium (2013)—capture more than they intend about the uneven global distribution of futurity, wealth, and well-being. Similarly, both Bedwin Hacker (El Fani 2003) and Africa Paradis (Ammoussou 2006) de-romanticize the hacker to fit with an electronic globalization that accentuates the gulf between ‘developed' and ‘developing' worlds. Finally, the hectic, genre-bending Les saignantes (Bekolo 2005) explores the same gulf within a ‘developing' nation. In the end, while aspects of afrocyberpunk cinema look very familiar to western eyes, these films use those pieces to play an often different game; after all, if the new colonial power is the deracinated global corporation that is colonizing everyone, then afrocyberpunk cinema offers lessons for all of us.
