A “Scented Declaration of Progress”: Globalisation, Afropolitan Imagineering and Familiar Orientations

Abstract

Branded as “Africa's first luxury perfume”, the Scent of Africa perfume is a “scented declaration of progress”. Particularly fascinating is the commercial advertisement for the perfume, which I argue to be an “Afropolitan Imagineering” project that is intended to signal Africa's rise and its new association with global cosmopolitanism. At first glance, the Scent of Africa perfume advertisement seems to point to the ways in which Imagineering projects can reproduce colonial discourses about Africanness. However, in this article, I suggest that we complicate the advertisement and examine its subversive potential to decentre whiteness and celebrate Africanness while writing Africa into the world. Despite this subversion, I conclude that African worlding practices should disinherit the familiarity of Eurocentric geographic determinism that is embedded in Afropolitan Imagineering and instead become informed by afro‐futuristic imaginings and disidentification politics.

Memories of an Imperial City: Race, Gender, and Birmingham, Alabama

“…Her tenure as a senior Bush Administration official coincided with the rapid militarisation of US foreign policy towards Africa, through the creation of the Department of Defense’s Africa Command (AFRICOM) and the expansion of the GWOT in West Africa (Meché ). Not far from the exhibit hall—but perhaps beyond the purview of an official Afropolitan sensibility (Adeniyi Ogunyankin )—one can observe another kind of pan‐African art on display: graffiti etched under a highway overpass approximating a Black Power‐era Angela Davis (see Figure ). Painted in red, the rendering of Davis with her mouth open defiantly attests to the durability and desirability of her image as a global symbol of protest politics (Davis ; James ; Raiford ).…”

‘The City of Our Dream’: Owambe Urbanism and Low‐income Women's Resistance in Ibadan, Nigeria

“…Thus, there are ongoing, pervasive and conscious efforts to project a new image of Africa and Africans as worthy of being considered world‐class and central to the global imaginary. Such efforts are what I refer to as Afropolitan Imagineering (Adeniyi Ogunyankin, ).…”

“…Unlike Selasi's definition of Afropolitan, Afropolitan Imagineering primarily pertains to the continent and similarly to Mbembe's definition; it is about the refusal of victim identity and assertion that Africa is part of the world. Moreover, to echo the critiques of Afropolitan/Afropolitanism, the project of Afropolitan Imagineering has the proclivity towards re‐centring the West as the ‘world’ in terms of the aspiration to be identified as world‐class, which is often predicated on Westernized standards and definitions (Adeniyi Ogunyankin, ).…”

“…Thus, Afropolitan Imagineering is the production, both real and aspirational, of new images/narratives of Africa and Africans as world‐class and cosmopolitan, and it consciously replaces the negative colonial and neocolonial ones (see Adeniyi Ogunyankin, ). These images often embrace a pan‐African identity or evoke a degree of Afrocentricism—painfully cognizant of the past and intentionally focused on re‐representing a new and improved Africa(n) (Adeniyi Ogunyankin, ). Afropolitan Imagineering's re‐representation of Africa breaks from the history of Africa as a ‘refused continent’ (Mudimbe, : 9) and also disrupts the notion that geographical difference across space is figured as a historical difference across time (McClintock, ).…”

“…Afropolitan Imagineering is concerned with ‘worlding’ Africa and Africans. One of the key ways in which the continent is being worlded (Roy, ) is via the intense focus on neoliberal urbanism to move African cities up in the global urban hierarchy through their recognition as world‐class, global cities (Adeniyi Ogunyankin, ). As cities are key engines of economic growth, it has become increasingly important for government, policymakers and planners to overcome what has been labeled as the failed urbanism—that is, the ‘urbanization without development’ (Locatelli and Nugent, : 2)—of the majority of Africa's cities.…”