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In his 1988 essay entitled "What Has Literature Got to Do with It?" Chinua Achebe stated that "[p]eople create stories create people; or rather, stories create people create stories" (Achebe 1990, 162), thus questioning the validity of a differentiation between people(s) and their stories. It seems, almost, as if the making-of-worlds through storytelling is an integral human characteristic that points towards the connectedness of all human experience. Storytelling, thus, is marked as such an intrinsically (if possibly not exclusively) human concept which connects cultures, languages, and literary traditions. These connections, however, are never linear and might branch out in any direction, locating literature within a network of stories and storytelling. This network of literary (and oral) storytelling provides connections that reach out into the past, while also facilitating new, future imaginaries. As critical posthumanist thought is becoming more and more institutionalized, it is often perceived as providing entangled networks of pluralities that are post-racial and post-gender. Operative notions of the '(hu)man,' however, which are essential in the term posthumanism itself, are firmly rooted in Western tradition and remain largely uncontested (Jackson 2013). As black literary voices are becoming ever more audible in popular culture and academic discourse, however, the conflicting realities of Western and non-Western formations of (human and non-human) actors and actants1 manifest themselves in texts. Literatures that incorporate non-traditional actors attempt to imagine life beyond traditional human subjectivity. Aiming at portraying life in its agentic potency, I want to argue that these literatures seek to perform subjectivities that challenge perceptions of normativity and species boundaries. This provides intriguing opportunities to engage with the multitude of subjectivities, to determine the status quo of life in literature, and to consider the importance of these new imaginaries. Nnedi Okorafor's award-winning novel Lagoon, first published in 2014, navigates the plurality of subjectivities in the wake of a maritime alien invasion (Okorafor 2015a).2 Set in the vibrant metropolis of Lagos, the narrative shifts between Black human and Black alien subjectivities, while engaging human, animal and spirit narrators. On the one hand, this questions the singularity of human experience and underlines the interconnectedness of all life on earth, while pointing, on the other hand,

(Re-)Negotiating Black Posthumanism – The Precarity of Race in Nnedi Okorafor's ‚Lagoon‘