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.
Introduction Carli Coetzee
1. Rethinking African culture and identity: the Afropolitan model Chielozona Eze
2. Cosmopolitanism with African roots: Afropolitanism’s ambivalent mobilities Susanne Gehrmann
3. The politics of Afropolitanism Amatoritsero Ede
4. Afropolitanism as critical consciousness: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s and Teju Cole’s internet presence Miriam Pahl
5. Exorcising the future: Afropolitanism’s spectral origins Stephanie Bosch Santana
6. ‘Why I am (still) not an Afropolitan’ Emma Dabiri
7. Part-Time Africans, Europolitans and ‘Africa lite’ Grace A. Musilla
8. ‘We, Afropolitans’ Chielozona Eze
9. Being-in-the-world: the Afropolitan Moroccan author’s worldview in the new millennium Valérie K. Orlando
10. Naija boy remix: Afroexploitation and the new media creative economies of cosmopolitan African youth Krystal Strong and Shaun Ossei-Owusu
Biography
Carli Coetzee is the co-editor of Negotiating the Past: The Making of Memory in South Africa (1998) and the author of Accented Futures: Language Activism and the Ending of Apartheid (2013). She is the editor of the Journal of African Cultural Studies and a research associate at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa.
