Special Session

Postcolonial Studies / Cultural Studies

Ezekiel Olufayo (University of South Dakota)
ezek@****.com (Log-in to reveal)

This panel focuses on Afropolitanism and its departure from what Achille Mbembe conceptualizes as “the nativistic reflex;” a term the theorist used in his argument that Afrocentric ideologies such as Pan-Africanism and Negritude foster “a culture of hatred” and division, not “diversity.” While Afropolitanism offers us a new way of re-imagining Africans as global citizens in the age of transnationalism, the fact that critics argue that Afropolitanism oversimplifies and undermines the nationalist struggle of anti-colonial movements in Africa is, among others, the concern of this panel. This panel, in reference to contemporary African literature, invites papers that interrogate this question and more: “who is an African and who is not or what is African and what is not?”

As Africans move beyond African borders in the twenty-first century, African writers such as Chris Abani, Teju Cole, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, NoViolet Bulawayo, Biyanvanga Wainaina, Dinaw Mengestu and many others are committed to reimagining the concept of “home” and “what it means to be African?” in the era of mass globalization and “new” diasporic belonging. This phenomenon is what Taiye Selasi terms Afropolitanism in her 2005 essay “Bye-Bye Babar (or What is an Afropolitan?” A concept Achille Mbembe later explains as “the ability to see one’s face in that of a foreigner” and “work with what seem to be opposites” in order to create “an ethic of tolerance” and “revive African aesthetic and cultural creativity in the same way as Harlem or New Orleans once did in the United States” in his 2007 essay, “Afropolitanism.” African writers have either engaged with Africa as a cosmopolitan continent of hybridized cultural heritage of European colonizers and Arabs or portray how African immigrants in other places of the world, particularly America, have created a “new” Black diaspora.

While Afropolitanist decentralization of African identity reveals Africa’s (and Africans’) connection with other parts of the world and allows new forms of cultural creativity, critics have argued that Afropolitanism undermines the anticolonial commitment of the first and second generations of African writers whose works elevate African heritage and conceptualize “what it means to be African?” while promoting class biases and neglecting Africans who cannot afford mobility between different worlds. The clash between Afropolitanist idea of globalization (and cosmopolitanism) and Pan-Africanist idea of “Africanness” is a major interest in this panel and beyond. This panel welcomes submissions on (but not limited to) how Anglophone and Francophone African writers have portrayed Africa’s and Africans’ hybridity against the backdrop of postcolonial politics, migration and “new diaspora.”