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Notes
1 Okorafor, Binti: The Complete Trilogy (New York: Daw Books, 2020), 3. Page references throughout are to this edition. Altogether, the series consists of the 2015 novella Binti; the 2019 short story “Binti: Sacred Fire,” which was written to follow the first novella; the subsequent 2017 novella sequel Binti: Home; and the final 2018 novella sequel Binti: The Night Masquerade. Extending the concept of ancient astronomical devices into the future, Okorafor describes astrolabes in the series as advanced identification and navigation tools (4).
2 Ibid., 3–4.
3 I am building on Flavia Dzodan, “My Feminism Will Be Intersectional or It Will Be Bullshit!” Tigerbeatdown, October 10, 2011, http://tigerbeatdown.com/2011/10/10/my-feminism-will-be-intersectional-or-it-will-be-bullshit/. The term “STEMinist” seems to have gained prominence in the social media era. At the time of this writing, it is not in the Oxford English Dictionary. I am using a decapitalized and redefined version of this term, as I describe shortly.
4 These issues are engaged across the following: Safiya Umoja Noble, Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (New York: New York University Press, 2018); Ruha Benjamin, Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code (Medford, MA: Polity Press, 2019); Ebony Omotola McGee, Black, Brown, Bruised: How Racialized STEM Education Stifles Innovation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press, 2021 [2020]); and Ebony O. McGee and William H. Robinson, eds., Diversifying STEM: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Race and Gender (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2020).
5 Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred (New York: Bold Type Books, 2021), 5. See also Alfred Mays et al., “Juneteenth in STEMM and the Barriers to Equitable Science,” Cell, 186, no. 12 (2023): 2511.
6 Notwithstanding forebears in humanistic and social science Black studies, such as W.E.B. Du Bois, who long ago issued an early “challenge to scientific racism,” laying “the foundation of Black intellectual thought in STEM,” in McGee, Black, Brown, Bruised, 28.
7 See Stephanie Y. Mitchem, African American Folk Healing (New York: New York University Press, 2007), 20; and Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2013), ix.
8 McKittrick, Dear Science and Other Stories (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021), 38.
9 McKittrick continues, “attentive to racism, yes, but not understanding scientific racism as the only way to define black life,” in ibid., 1.
10 adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds (Chino, CA: AK Press), 17.
11 Audre Lorde, The Cancer Journals (San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute, 1987 [1980]).
12 The asterisk functions “to indicate the inclusion of gender identities such as gender-fluid, agender, etc., alongside transsexual and transgender,” in “trans*, adj,” Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford University Press, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/1137339111 (accessed July 2023).
13 Okorafor, Binti, 49, 15.
14 Okorafor, “Interview with Nigerian Newspaper, the Daily Trust,” Nnedi’s Wahala Zone Blog, September 24, 2016, https://nnedi.blogspot.com/2016/09/interview-with-nigerian-newspaper-daily_3.html.
15 See Dustin Crowley, “Binti’s R/evolutionary Cosmopolitan Ecologies,” Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, 6, no. 2 (2019): 238; and Emily S. Davis, “Decolonizing Knowledge in Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti Trilogy,” in Writing Beyond the State: Post-Sovereign Approaches to Human Rights in Literary Studies, ed. Alexandra S. Moore and Samantha Pinto (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 45.
16 Okorafor, Binti, 14.
17 Ibid., 33.
18 Ibid., 16, 290–91.
19 Ibid., 48.
20 Ibid., 28.
21 Ibid., 3.
22 Ibid., 9.
23 Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 236, 237.
24 Okorafor, Binti, 24. Binti initially survives the Meduse’s attack only because the properties of her edan cause one unfortunate Meduse to disintegrate upon contact and allow Binti and the Meduse to communicate across the ghostly current it emits (“blue ghost,” the Meduse call it). Binti uses this to buy herself time, sealing herself in her room while slowly getting to know the Meduse.
25 Ibid., 26–7.
26 Ibid., 52.
27 Ibid., 48, 67, 75.
28 Ibid., 52–6.
29 Ibid., 43.
30 Ibid., 7.
31 Ibid., 6.
32 Ibid., 28.
33 Ibid., 182. Interestingly, the Enyi Zinariya introduce Binti to her birthright, another Black steminist tool: activation of extraterrestrial technology present in Binti’s genetic code that enable her to communicate across space and time.
34 Ibid., 332.
35 Binti recalls Nichelle Nichols’ efforts to bridge the gap between the diverse representation of space she embodied as Lieutenant Nyota Uhura on television’s Star Trek: The Original Series by recruiting women and people of color to NASA’s astronaut program in 1977. Scholar andré m. carrington describes this as Nichols’ “pursuit of utopia” in spite of the shortcomings of NASA administration as later evidenced by the 1986 Challenger disaster, in Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 82.
36 Okorafor, Binti, 332.
37 See Melissa Phruksachart, “The Literature of White Liberalism,” Boston Review, August 21, 2020; and Nick Mitchell, “Diversity,” in Keywords for African American Studies, ed. Erica R. Edwards, Roderick A. Ferguson, and Jeffrey O.G. Ogbar (New York: New York University Press, 2018), 68.
38 Okorafor, Binti (Binti #1) (New York: Tordotcom, 2015), back cover. Mathematical harmonizing is the long-standing method by which Binti’s family has achieved a kind of nominal middle-class status via her father’s skill and survival—a pathway which she originally hopes to extend for herself. See Okorafor, Binti, 14, 143.
39 Ibid., 230.
40 Ibid., 332.
41 Ibid., 16, 331.
42 Ibid., 10. Binti also relishes in the fact that her hair is unique in that it is thicker than her counterparts’ and, like her darker skin tone, links her to the other side of her ancestry that comes from the Enyi Zinariya (7, 172).
43 Ibid., 39. I presume that the Meduse that stung Binti is Okwu, although the Meduse operate on some level as a hive mind and who exactly stung her is unmentioned in the text. Okwu earlier tells Binti: “We don’t like stinging” (34).
44 For example, Binti is later reincarnated by baby Miri 12 “microbes” that result in another permanent bond between her and the non-human, extraterrestrial being named New Fish, the daughter of Third Fish—the ship-sized being who first transported Binti to Oomza, in ibid., 317, 321–22. New Fish is also somewhat new to this change: “I don’t know much” (321) and continues: “Most Miri 12s never do this. We don’t become more” (321, emphasis in original).
45 Ibid., 42.
46 T. Garner writes: “Becoming is a highly productive concept in transgender studies,” and in conjunction with a long intellectual tradition of the concept, it “makes visible the technologies, within both discourse and practice, through which bodies and borders become possible”: “Becoming,” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 1, no. 1–2 (2014): 30, 31.
47 Okorafor, Binti, 113.
48 Lorde, The Cancer Journals, 55. I imagine that Lorde sometimes felt these emotions all at once, until eventually she can say, “that in the process of losing a breast I had become a more whole person,” as she overall advanced toward an even greater self-love. Lorde’s wholeness is not a bound totality, but rather an expression of ongoing hope and openness to redefining what “becom[ing] a more whole person” might mean.
49 See Jennifer C. Nash, “Intersectionality,” in Keywords for Gender and Sexuality Studies, ed. Keywords Feminist Editorial Collective (New York: New York University Press, 2021), 131; Lisa Kahaleole Hall, “Difference,” in Keywords for Gender and Sexuality Studies, ed. Keywords Feminist Editorial Collective (New York: New York University Press, 2021), 71; and Kai M. Green and Treva Ellison, “Tranifest,” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 1, nos 1/2 (2014): 222.
50 Okorafor, Binti, 63.
51 Ibid., 65.
52 Ibid., 66.
53 Ibid., 279.
54 Haras tells Binti that “I’ll have to meet with the committee” about the war: “We’ll meet and discuss, then we will act,” in ibid., 343.
55 Ibid., 14, 9.
56 Ibid., 48.
57 Okorafor, Binti (Binti #1), back cover.
58 Harney and Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (Brooklyn, NY: Minor Compositions, 2013), 26.
59 See McGee, Black, Brown, Bruised, 115–36; and Mays et al., “Juneteenth in STEMM,” 2513–16.
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Dana Murphy
Dana Murphy is Assistant Professor of Black Studies and English in the Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences at the California Institute of Technology. She specializes in Black feminisms, literary criticism, and diaspora studies. Murphy has published essays in African American Review, CLA Journal, and Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International. She is currently completing her book inspired by Phillis Wheatley (under contract with Duke University Press).