Einzelprojekte

Afropolitanism's vernaculars: literature and theory

The purpose of my contribution to this project is to critique cosmopolitanism’s tendency to circumvent African spaces, aesthetics and phenomenologies. I aim to theorise the term Afropolitanism and to implement it in the analysis of contemporary African and diasporic literary texts. Coined by Taiye Selasi in 2005, “Afropolitanism” initially offers a welcome rejection of a debilitating autochthony of Africanness by describing a young mix-culture that is “redefining what it means to be African” (Selasi 2013: 529). But, on closer inspection, Selasi’s Afropolitanism is little more than African expatriate and diaspora culture in a world quite radically dissociated from African everyday life. There is no cosmopolitanism without Africa, yet the de facto and systematic evasion of Africa in the concept of cosmopolitanism is what produces the easily marketable concept “Afropolitanism”. I argue that Afropolitanism should be articulated as a reverse discourse before we can adequately understand the processes that persist in writing Africa out of the world. Drawing on Jean and John Comaroff’s theoretical claim that the global north needs to turn to the global south to understand its ever-intensifying economic and social precarity, and furthering my previous work on theory in/of Africa, I will investigate how Afropolitanism – or cosmopolitanism reoriented through the prism of African everyday life – might contribute to the theoretical repertoires of literary cosmopolitanism.

Quelle der Beschreibung: Information des Anbieters

Forschungsgebiete

Literatur aus Afrika südlich der Sahara, Literaturtheorie, World Literature/Weltliteratur, Ästhetik
Kosmopolitismus ; Afropolitanismus ; Diaspora ; Phänomenologie

Links

Ansprechpartner

Einrichtungen

Uppsala universitet / Uppsala University (UU)

Verknüpfte Ressourcen

Projekte und Forschung

World Literatures. Cosmopolitan and Vernacular Dynamics; Locations and Orientations in World Literature
Datum der Veröffentlichung: 03.06.2019
Letzte Änderung: 03.06.2019