Making Bridges

Abstract

AbstractThis chapter examines YA fiction by Nalo Hopkinson and Nnedi Okorafor and draws on Raymond Williams’s idea of dominant/residual/emergent in order to see how emergent practices—particularly those rooted in religious traditions—enable a shift of emphasis away from national or State-based identities to non-natal kinship groups as a source of power, resistance, and safety. These novels illustrate the power of reimagining the local as a challenge to dominant, environmentally destructive systems. The ancient belief systems that characters rediscover ultimately serve as modes of resistance to the Anglo-European legacies of colonialism and imperialism that have done such damage to the planet and its inhabitants.