“Outside Is Dead”: Africfuturist Cinema and the Making of Climate Truth in Pumzi
Abstract
In the context of climate governance, cinema functions not only as representation, but as a site where climate knowledge is shaped, communicated, and made credible. Such representation has often privilege data-driven authority obscuring the epistemic politics through which environmental futures are defined and limited, particularly within the postcolonial contexts. However, in Africfuturism, this article argues that cinema intervenes by challenging the technocratic regimes of ecology through which climate knowledge is produced and understood. Through a close textual analysis of a film titled Pumzi (2009) using postcolonial ecocriticism and Ivakhiv’s biomorphy, the study revealed two key findings: 1) Pumzi portrays climate governance as a technocratic regime in Maitu Community that stabilises ecological collapse by converting environmental life into data, metrics, and bodily calibration. Thus, reproducing colonial hierarchies of control under the language of sustainability; 2) Through the central character’s dream and soil discovery, the film reframes climate truth in an ancestral-present epistemic return as relational and embodied. Therefore, exposing the data-driven climate narratives as a form of epistemic closure. By positioning cinema as a site of epistemic struggle, this study reconceptualises climate governance, not as the management of ecological systems but as a world-making apparatus that determines which eco-life can be perceived and allowed to endure. By unsettling the technocratic axiom, condensed in the dictum “Outside is dead,” Pumzi exposes climate governance as a colonial epistemic project that produces ecological death as a condition of knowledge as oppose to responding to planetary crisis.
Keywords: Climate truth, Africfuturism, postcolonial ecocriticism, biomorphy, technocolonialism.
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