Queer Afrotopias

This article examines how francophone African literature reimagines futurity through queer Afrotopian frameworks. Focusing on Werewere Liking’s Elle sera de jaspe et de corail and Mohammed Mbougar Sarr’s De purs hommes , it argues that queer Afrotopia functions not as a fixed model but as a generative mode of imagining African futures across divergent aesthetic and narrative forms. Relying on Felwine Sarr’s Afrotopia alongside queer African studies and postcolonial thought, the article shows how Liking constructs a cosmological and speculative vision grounded in ritual, cyclical temporality, and relational becoming, while Sarr situates queer futurity within an ethical and affective confrontation with necropolitical violence. Through close readings, the study demonstrates that both texts position queerness as central to the reconfiguration of African subjectivity, relationality, and imagination. By bringing these works into dialogue, the article contributes to ongoing debates in queer African studies by highlighting how literary form itself becomes a site of epistemological transformation. Ultimately, the article argues that African futures cannot be envisioned without integrating queer lives and imaginaries, which emerge as essential to Afrotopian renewal.

This article was published open access under a CC BY licence through the support of the Winthrop-King Institute: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ .