Afropolitanism: Reboot


Book Description

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.




Displaced


Book Description

Through specific and rigorous analysis of contemporary literary texts, this book shows how writers from inside affected communities portray indigeneity, displacement, and trauma. In a world of increasing global inequality, this study aims to demonstrate how literature, and the study of it, can effect positive social change, notably in the face of global environmental, economic, and social injustice. This collection brings together a diverse and compelling array of voices from academics leading their fields around the world, to pioneer a new approach to literary analysis anchored in engagement with our changing world.




Afropolitan Literature as World Literature


Book Description

African literature has never been more visible than it is today. Whereas Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, and Ngugi wa Thiong'o defined a golden generation of African writers in the 20th century, a new generation of “Afropolitan” writers including Chimamanda Adichie, Teju Cole, Taiye Selasi, and NoViolet Bulawayo have taken the world by storm by snatching up prestigious awards and selling millions of copies of their works. But what is the new, increasingly fashionable and marketable, Afropolitan vision of Africa's place in the world that they offer? How does it differ from that of previous generations? Why do some dissent? Afropolitanism refuses to reinforce images of Africa in world media as merely poor, war-torn, diseased, and constantly falling into chaos. By complicating the image of Africa as a hapless victim, Afropolitanism focuses on the wide-ranging influence Africa has on the world. However, some have characterized this kind of writing as light, populist fare that panders to Western audiences. Afropolitan Literature as World Literature examines the controversy surrounding Afropolitan literature in light of the unprecedented circulation of culture made possible by globalization, and ultimately argues for expanding its geographic and temporal boundaries.




Debating the Afropolitan


Book Description

This volume evaluates the vitality of the term ‘Afropolitan’ within the fields of African and Afro-diasporic studies. A hotly debated and malleable term, its wide circulation has allowed for Afropolitanism to become a contested space for critical inquiry. The contributions to this book are representative of the lively discussions that Afropolitan aesthetics, identity politics and Afro(cosmo)politanisms have sparked in recent years. The book aims to continue the debates around these concepts foregrounded by earlier works in the fields of postcolonial literature, African cultural studies, and studies of diaspora and transnationalism. This book was originally published as a special issue of the European Journal of English Studies.




Afropolitan Projects


Book Description

Beyond simplistic binaries of "the dark continent" or "Africa Rising," Africans at home and abroad articulate their identities through their quotidian practices and cultural politics. Amongst the privileged classes, these articulations can be characterized as Afropolitan projects--cultural, political, and aesthetic expressions of global belonging rooted in African ideals. This ethnographic study examines the Afropolitan projects of Ghanaians living in two cosmopolitan cities: Houston, Texas, and Accra, Ghana. Anima Adjepong's focus shifts between the cities, exploring contests around national and pan-African cultural politics, race, class, sexuality, and religion. Focusing particularly on queer sexuality, Adjepong offers unique insight into the contemporary sexual politics of the Afropolitan class. The book expands and complicates existing research by providing an in-depth transnational case study that not only addresses questions of cosmopolitanism, class, and racial identity but also considers how gender and sexuality inform the racialized identities of Africans in the United States and in Ghana. Bringing an understudied cohort of class-privileged Africans to the forefront, Adjepong offers a more fully realized understanding of the diversity of African lives.




African Literatures as World Literature


Book Description

The enormous success of writers such as Teju Cole and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie demonstrates that African literatures are now an international phenomenon. But the apparent global legibility of a small number of (mostly Anglophone) writers in the diaspora raises the question of how literary producers from the continent, both past and present, have situated their work in relation to the world and the kinds of material networks to which this corresponds. This collection shows how literatures from across the African continent engage with conceptualizations of 'the world' in relation to local social and political issues. Focusing on a wide variety of geographic, historical and linguistic contexts, the essays in this volume seek answers to the following questions: What are the topographies of 'the world' in different literary texts and traditions? What are that world's limits, boundaries and possibilities? How do literary modes and forms such as realism, narrative poetry or the political essay affect the presentation of worldliness? What are the material networks of circulation that allow African literatures to become world literature? African literatures, it emerges, do important theoretical work that speaks to the very core of world literary studies today.




The Passport That Does Not Pass Ports


Book Description

These seventeen pieces on travel in Africa by leading African authors take readers to places at once homelike and foreign. Against the tropes of travel writing, this book offers the acuity of vision of particular types of travelers. These are travelers whose mother tongue may find the hint of familiarity across otherwise unintelligible languages and for whom a foreign land isn’t necessarily strange; in it they perceive vestiges of the familiar. For them, the act of traveling extends a canvas on which to depict someone else’s reality—a reality never too distant from their own. What makes these writings coalesce is a reflection about the act of being in motion, about reconfiguring place; a consciousness of how geography redirects the focus of one’s gaze and, in turn, how that altered gaze filters inward. Having absorbed the landscape, inhaled the scents, paid heed to accents, and accepted the condition of being out of place, these travelers reconstitute individual consciousness and join a collective sense of existing beyond borders. Place inhabits this renewed sense of self; literature enables its expression. An inviting introduction to travel writing on Africa, The Passport That Does Not Pass Ports is absorbing reading for travelers and students of literature alike.




African Literature and US Empire


Book Description

Postcolonialism has long been associated with post-nationalism. Yet, the persistence of nation-oriented literatures from within the African postcolony and its diasporas registers how dreams of national becoming endure. In this fascinating new study, Hallemeier brings together African literary studies, affect studies and US empire studies, to challenge chronologies that chart a growing disillusionment with the postcolonial nation and national development across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The Nigerian and South African writings in African Literature and US Empire, while often attuned to the trans- and extra- national, repeatedly scrutinise why visions of national exceptionalism, signified by a 'pan-African' Nigeria and 'new' South Africa, remain stubbornly affecting, despite decades of disillusionment with national governments beholden to a neocolonial global order. In these fictions, optimistic forms of nationalism cannot be reduced to easily critiqued state-sanctioned discourses of renewal and development. They are also circulated through experiences of embodied need, quotidian aspiration and transnational, pan-African relationship.




Handbook of Racism, Xenophobia, and Populism


Book Description

This handbook presents the roots of symbolic racism as partly in both anti-black antagonism and non-racial conservative attitudes and values, representing a new form of racism independent of older racial and political attitudes. By doing so, it homes in on certain historical incidents and episodes and presents a cogent analysis of anti-black, Jim Crowism, anti-people of color (Black, Latino, Native Americans), and prejudice that exists in the United States and around the world as a central tenet of racism. The book exposes the reader to the nature and practice of stereotyping, negative bias, social categorization, modern forms of racism, immigration law empowerment, racialized incarceration, and police brutality in the American heartland. It states that several centuries of white Americans’ negative socializing culture marked by widespread negative attitudes toward African Americans, are not eradicated and are still rife. Further, the book provides a panoramic view of trends of racial discrimination and other negative and desperate challenges that Black, Indigenous, and People of Color face across the world. Finally, the volume examines xenophobia, racism, prejudice, and stereotyping in different contexts, including topics such as Covid-19, religion and racism, information manipulation, and populism. The book, therefore, is a must-read for students, researchers, and scholars of political science, psychology, history, sociology, communications/media studies, diplomatic studies, and law in general, as well as ethnic and racial studies, American politics, global affairs, populism, and discrimination in particular.




The Palgrave Handbook of Cold War Literature


Book Description

This book offers a comprehensive guide to global literary engagement with the Cold War. Eschewing the common focus on national cultures, the collection defines Cold War literature as an international current focused on the military and ideological conflicts of the age and characterised by styles and approaches that transcended national borders. Drawing on specialists from across the world, the volume analyses the period’s fiction, poetry, drama and autobiographical writings in three sections: dominant concerns (socialism, decolonisation, nuclearism, propaganda, censorship, espionage), common genres (postmodernism, socialism realism, dystopianism, migrant poetry, science fiction, testimonial writing) and regional cultures (Asia, Africa, Oceania, Europe and the Americas). In doing so, the volume forms a landmark contribution to Cold War literary studies which will appeal to all those working on literature of the 1945-1989 period, including specialists in comparative literature, postcolonial literature, contemporary literature and regional literature.