An Afrofuture of Global Health

Based on archival and ethnographic research from Senegal, West Africa, this article uses Afrofuturism as a theoretical framework and orientation to understand how global health might be better suited for people around the world. We take the concept of interembodiment (Bunkley, 2022) as a way of thinking about how perspectives from the Continent can shape and shift calcified global health understandings of bodies, health, and disease. The askable, the thinkable, and the possible depend upon subverting old dominant paradigms of how the world is viewed, which depend on ossified power relations. Instead, global health should be centering the experiences of those who have thus far only been seen as recipients of knowledge rather than generators of knowledge. Afrofuturism, a theory and a movement that center African and African diaspora experiences, is a way for global health to begin to critically engage with its past and shift perspective towards an understanding that better encompasses people of the global majority.