Resumo

DHILLON, Bikrambir  e  SHARMA, Diksha. Surveilling the Black Womb: Dystopian Biopolitics and Posthuman Kinship in Womb City. JLS [online]. 2025, vol.41, n.1, pp.1-18. ISSN 1753-5387.  https://doi.org/10.25159/1753-5387/20147.

Tlotlo Tsamaase's novel Womb City is an Africanfuturist dystopia that stages the entanglement of biopolitics, surveillance, and reproductive control in a near-future Botswana. This article interrogates how the novel exposes the fusion of algorithmic monitoring with a market-driven artificial womb economy and how it imagines counter forms of kinship that resist this order. Through close readings of key scenes, the analysis shows how microchips, purity tests, and the Murder Trials render Black women's bodies legible as data and capital, turning fertility into what Melinda Cooper names "life as surplus." The study reads the text through feminist posthumanism and African feminist thought to argue that Tsamaase integrates Setswana cosmology with cyberpunk motifs in ways that provincialise Western theoretical frames. Nelah's metamorphosis with Moremi's ghost and Matsieng produces a composite subject that refigures autonomy as posthuman kin-making and reframes justice through ancestral affiliation rather than technocratic reform. By situating Womb City within contemporary Africanfuturist discourse the article demonstrates how Tsamaase expands feminist science fiction by interrogating surveillance and biocapitalism from a decolonial African vantage and by offering a contingent model of kinship that contests the racialised governance of life in the Global South.

Palavras-chave : Africanfuturism; feminist posthumanism; surveillance; biopolitics; reproductive justice; kinship; Tlotlo Tsamaase.

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