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Incorporates creative writing and analysis of contemporary African speculative fiction to center dreams as a tool for liberation.

In Decolonial Dreamwork, Jenna Hanchey centers dreaming, both waking and sleeping, to examine how Africanfuturism enables futures beyond the “reality” of what developmental imperatives deem possible. Engaging with the speculative fiction of Tade Thompson, Shingai Njeri Kagunda, Yvette Lisa Ndlovu, Tlotlo Tsamaase, Suyi Davies Okungbowa, Sofia Samatar, Moses Ose Utomi, and the Sauúti Collective, Hanchey demonstrates how these works provide a roadmap for decolonial dreaming—imagining beyond the conceptual limits Western paradigms impose. Connecting African and Indigenous thought, Decolonial Dreamwork shows how the labor of imagining beyond coloniality is nonlinear, embodied, emplaced, liquid, and reliant on multiplicities of stories.

As both a scholar and speculative fiction writer, Hanchey blends analysis with examples of her own creative work to demonstrate the importance of not only reading African speculative fiction but joining in and dreaming alongside it. Punctuated with exercises and prompts, Decolonial Dreamwork functions as a participatory workbook for liberation that will be as generative for classrooms and book clubs as it is for theory development. We can all tell stories, Hanchey exhorts readers, that break colonial realities and create space for better worlds.

This is a sharply observed assessment of the history of the last half century by a distinguished group of historians of Kenya. At the same time the book is a courageous reflection in the dilemmas of African nationhood.

Professor B. A. Ogot says:

“The main purpose of the book is to show that decolonization does not only mean the transfer of alien power to sovereign nationhood; it must also entail the liberation of the worlds of spirit and culture, as well as economics and politics.

“The book also raises a more fundamental question, that is: How much independence is available to any state, national economy or culture in today’s world? It asks how far are Africa’s miseries linked to the colonial past and to the process of decolonization?

“In particular the book raises the basic question of how far Kenya is avoidably neo-colonial? And what does neo-colonial dependence mean? The book answers these questions by discussing the dynamic between the politics of decolonization, the social history of class formation and the economics of dependence. The book ends with a provocative epilogue discussing the transformation of the post-colonial state from a single-party to a multi-party system.”