“Ode a Laudelina” and the insurgency of the future: Afrofuturism, ancestry, and colonial rupture

Abstract

Afrofuturism, as a literary, aesthetic and political movement, reconfigures the relationship between past, present and future, constructing narratives in which technology, memory and ancestry intersect to project new possibilities of existence for the black population. In Lu Ain-Zaila’s short story Ode to Laudelina, this dialogue manifests itself in the subversion of the colonial logics that have historically shaped domestic work in Brazil. By constructing characters who break with a system of structural oppression and using narrative elements that challenge the linearity of time, the author inscribes her work in an Afrofuturist tradition that re-signifies the experience of the diaspora. This article proposes an analysis of the short story from an anthropological perspective, exploring how Afrofuturism operates as a tool for reinventing reality and political imagination. The text also investigates how the short story mobilises aesthetics, the body and technological imagery as narrative strategies of resistance and reconstruction of the future.