Touching imaginaries: otherwise worlds and speculative techno-touch in Wanuri Kahiu’s Pumzi

Abstract

ABSTRACT Through a discussion of Wanuri Kahiu’s short 2009 film Pumzi, this article illustrates how Afrofuturist film interrogates and extends normative theoretical paradigms for conceptualizing the intersections of technology and touch. Building on work in Black Studies, the article situates technology in the history of modernity, arguing that biopolitical modernity may itself be a kind of techno-touch – a “hold” – which produces an exclusionary, racialized construction of the human. It then turns Pumzi to show that, while the film situates technology in a long history of capitalist modernity, it also illustrates how liberatory possibilities for “otherwise worlds” may nonetheless emerge at touch and technology’s intersection. This occurs not only in terms of what it represents, but also in its status as an affective encounter in the world – a form of touch – in itself.