“A Different Creature, Not So Human”: Globalgothic Shapeshifting and Weaponzed Rape in Nnedi Okorafor’s Who Fears Death (2024)

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Svetlana Stefanova

Universidad Internacional de La Rioja

,

Spain

svetlana.stefanova@unir.net

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Contemporary Women's Writing, vpae015, https://doi.org/10.1093/cww/vpae015

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18 May 2024

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    Svetlana Stefanova, “A Different Creature, Not So Human”: Globalgothic Shapeshifting and Weaponzed Rape in Nnedi Okorafor’s Who Fears Death, Contemporary Women's Writing, 2024;, vpae015, https://doi.org/10.1093/cww/vpae015

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Abstract

This essay explores Nnedi Okorafor’s engagement with the traumatic consequences of a civil war in Africa through the shapeshifting motif in her novel Who Fears Death (2010). It argues that the interaction between Africanjujuism and globalgothic allows her to transcend the specificities of the conflict and address the transgenerational effects of ethnic violence as a global problem. Okorafor employs Africanjujuism to describe the protagonist’s shapeshifting as a means of healing, empowerment, and knowledge. In contrast, she uses Gothic tropes to depict extreme violence. Representing a girl born of wartime rape as the trickster god Eshu, who adds hope to a dark moment in history, constitutes a strong critique of a society in which women victims of war rape are often ignored and their children stigmatized.

© The Author(s) 2024. Published by Oxford University Press; all rights reserved. For commercial re-use, please contact reprints@oup.com for reprints and translation rights for reprints. All other permissions can be obtained through our RightsLink service via the Permissions link on the article page on our site—for further information please contact journals.permissions@oup.com.

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