Afropolitanism And The Novel

The place of the novel as a literary form in Africa is contested. Its colonial origins and its unaffordability for most Africans make it a bad fit for the continent, yet it was also central to the creation of most postcolonial African national literary canons. These bipolar traditions remain unresolved in recent debates about Afropolitanism and the novel in Africa today. This book extends this debate, arguing that Africa’s ‘de-realization’ in global representation and the global economy is reflected in the African novel becoming dominated by Afropolitan, rather than African, aesthetics, styles, and forms. Drawing on close readings of a variety of major African novels of the 2000s, the volume traces the tensions between the novel’s complicity with and resistance to such de-realization. The book argues that current trends and experiments in African non-realist genres, such as science fiction, magical and animist realism, Afro-futurism, and speculative environmentalism, are the result of a preoccupation with such de-realization. The volume is a significant exploration into literary form and its social, philosophical, political, and economic underpinnings. It will be a must-read for scholars, students, and researchers of African literature, politics, philosophy, and culture studies.

This study proposes that – rather than trying to discern the normative value of Afropolitanism as an identificatory concept, politics, ethics or aesthetics – Afropolitanism may be best approached as a distinct historical and cultural moment, that is, a certain historical constellation that allows us to glimpse the shifting and multiple silhouettes which Africa, as signifier, as real and imagined locus, embodies in the globalized, yet predominantly Western, cultural landscape of the 21st century. As such, Making Black History looks at contemporary fictions of the African or Black Diaspora that have been written and received in the moment of Afropolitanism. Discursively, this moment is very much part of a diasporic conversation that takes place in the US and is thus informed by various negotiations of blackness, race, class, and cultural identity. Yet rather than interpreting Afropolitan literatures (merely) as a rejection of racial solidarity, as some commentators have, they should be read as ambivalent responses to post-racial discourses dominating the first decade of the 21st century, particularly in the US, which oscillate between moments of intense hope and acute disappointment. Please read our interview with Dominique Haensell here: https://blog.degruyter.com/de-gruyters-10th-open-access-book-anniversary-dominique-haensell-and-her-winning-title-making-black-history/

Introduction. Nigerian Connections -- Palm Wine, Amos Tutuola, and a Literary Gatekeeper -- Bahia-Lagos-Ouidah: Mariana's Story -- Igbo Life, Past and Present: Three Views -- Inland, Upriver with the Empire: Borrioboola-Gha -- The City, according to Ekwensi . . . and Onuzo -- Points of Cultural Geography: Ibadan . . . Enugu, Onitsha, Nsukka -- Been-To: Dreams, Disappointments, Departures, and Returns -- Dateline Lagos: Reporting on Nigeria to the World -- Death in Lagos -- Tai Solarin: On Colonial Power, Schools, Work Ethic, Religion, and the Press -- Wole Soyinka, Leo Frobenius, and the Ori Olokun -- A Voice from the Purdah: Baba of Karo -- Bauchi: The Academic and the Imam -- Railtown Writers -- Nigeria at War -- America Observed: With Nigerian Eyes -- Transatlantic Shuttle -- Sojourners from Black Britain -- Oyotunji Village, South Carolina: Reverse Afropolitanism.

Achille Mbembe is one of the world’s most profound critics of colonialism and its consequences, a major figure in the emergence of a new wave of French critical theory. His writings examine the complexities of decolonization for African subjectivities and the possibilities emerging in its wake. In Out of the Dark Night, he offers a rich analysis of the paradoxes of the postcolonial moment that points toward new liberatory models of community, humanity, and planetarity. In a nuanced consideration of the African experience, Mbembe makes sweeping interventions into debates about citizenship, identity, democracy, and modernity. He eruditely ranges across European and African thought to provide a powerful assessment of common ways of writing and thinking about the world. Mbembe criticizes the blinders of European intellectuals, analyzing France’s failure to heed postcolonial critiques of ongoing exclusions masked by pretenses of universalism. He develops a new reading of African modernity that further develops the notion of Afropolitanism, a novel way of being in the world that has arisen in decolonized Africa in the midst of both destruction and the birth of new societies. Out of the Dark Night reconstructs critical theory’s historical and philosophical framework for understanding colonial and postcolonial events and expands our sense of the futures made possible by decolonization.

A stunning novel, spanning generations and continents, Ghana Must Go by rising star Taiye Selasi is a tale of family drama and forgiveness, for fans of Zadie Smith and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. This is the story of a family -- of the simple, devastating ways in which families tear themselves apart, and of the incredible lengths to which a family will go to put itself back together. It is the story of one family, the Sais, whose good life crumbles in an evening; a Ghanaian father, Kweku Sai, who becomes a highly respected surgeon in the US only to be disillusioned by a grotesque injustice; his Nigerian wife, Fola, the beautiful homemaker abandoned in his wake; their eldest son, Olu, determined to reconstruct the life his father should have had; their twins, seductive Taiwo and acclaimed artist Kehinde, both brilliant but scarred and flailing; their youngest, Sadie, jealously in love with her celebrity best friend. All of them sent reeling on their disparate paths into the world. Until, one day, tragedy spins the Sais in a new direction. This is the story of a family: torn apart by lies, reunited by grief. A family absolved, ultimately, by that bitter but most tenuous bond: familial love. Ghana Must Go interweaves the stories of the Sais in a rich and moving drama of separation and reunion, spanning generations and cultures from West Africa to New England, London, New York and back again. It is a debut novel of blazing originality and startling power by a writer of extraordinary gifts. 'Ghana Must Go is both a fast moving story of one family's fortunes and an ecstatic exploration of the inner lives of its members. With her perfectly-pitched prose and flawless technique, Selasi does more than merely renew our sense of the African novel: she renews our sense of the novel, period. An astonishing debut' Teju Cole, author of Open City Taiye Selasi was born in London and raised in Massachusetts. She holds a B.A. in American Studies from Yale and an M.Phil. in International Relations from Oxford. "The Sex Lives of African Girls" (Granta, 2011), Selasi's fiction debut, appears in Best American Short Stories 2012. She lives in Rome.

A dissemination of the figure of the 'Afropolitan' from a critical literary angle. It attempts to explore a field of study which lacks a comprehensive literary approach to ways of being Afropolitan in the 21st century.

In Search of the Afropolitan explores human encounters and moments that speak to the challenges of being a 21st century African of the world. Against the background of an engaging evaluation of the heated debate on Afropolitanism and what constitutes an Afropolitan, the authors turn to literature and its intrinsic capacity for unfolding the human figure of the African as inherently complex and multidimensional. Through a detailed probing of the Afropolitan in literary narratives, the book enters into conversations about self-understanding and the signification of Africa in the contexts of global mobility. The book conceives of Afropolitanism as a flexible space of inquiry that curbs the inclination to set the definition of the ‘ism’ in stone. Instead, it attempts to distil, through close-up character analyses, a multifarious sense of what it means to be Afropolitan in the contemporary moment. In that sense, the encounters we come across in the literary narratives produce unexpected ontological negotiations on what it means to be African in the world today. As a special feature of In Search of the Afropolitan,the authors’ conversations with prominent writers, thinkers, and critics provide a lively context for the ongoing debate on Afropolitanism and the Afropolitan.

This edited collection comprises an original and activist group of contributions on that much maligned figure, the Afropolitan. The contributors do not aim to define or fix the term anew; the reboot is, instead, the beginnings of an activist scholarly agenda in which ‘the Afropolitan’ is reimagined to include the stealthy figure crossing the Mediterranean by boat, and the Somali shopkeeper in a South African township. In their pieces included here, the authors insist on the need to ask questions about the inclusion of such globally mobile Africans in any theorisations of the transnational circuits we call Afropolitan. This collection, from some of the foremost voices on Afropolitanism, invigorates anew the debate, and reboots understandings of who the Afropolitan is, the many places he calls his origin, and the multiple places she comes to call home in the world. The chapters in this book were originally published in the Journal of African Cultural Studies.