What if perhaps : how Ekari Mbvundula disobeys history

Abstract

Academic discussion of the science fiction (SF) genre has engaged prominently since the 1970s with the ‘novum’, defined by Darko Suvin as a type of cognitive information allowing a SF text to deviate from reality in a reasonable, rational manner. Theorists have problematized the term’s assumption of an overarching ‘cognitive’ epistemology. In the wake of these debates, this article focuses on one particular subgenre of SF — alternate history (AH) — showing how Ekari Mbvundula disrupts it with her 2015 short story “Montague’s Last”. Just as the Suvinian novum is problematic for relying on the assumption of secular epistemology’s global universality, so too is AH’s dependence on the assumption of a singular, knowable, and universally agreeable historical narrative from which to deviate, because it overlooks how Eurocentric understandings of history are determined by global power relations, in both the past and the present. While the question inherent to AH is usually thought to be ‘What if x had happened differently to the historical narrative’, I argue that Mbvundula’s story posits that ‘Perhaps x has in fact happened differently to the historical narrative’. The story thus disobeys Eurocentric assumptions both in dominant critical definitions of SF and in History’s grand narrative.