‘Poison Rainbows’: The Speculative Jurisdiction of Okorafor's Lagoon

Abstract

Oil spills in the Niger Delta have been at the centre of both legal and literary imaginings as among the most acute examples of modern environmental degradation. In her novel Lagoon, Nnedi Okorafor responds to what Rob Nixon describes as the ‘slow violence’ inflicted by the oil industry on non-human persons. This article will cast the study of law and literature into the future and show how the speculative jurisdiction of Okorafor's africanfuturist writing provides an ‘alternative discourse’ to legal scholarship and identifies the accordance of legal personhood as a tool with which to build back towards Lagoon's ‘radical futurity’ of posthuman rights and protection.