Cosmopolitanism’s new clothes? The limits of the concept of Afropolitanism

Abstract

ANNA-LEENA TOIVANEN COSMOPOLITANISM'S NEW CLOTHES? THE LIMITS OF THE CONCEPT OF AFROPOLITANISM Despite all the attention it has received, Afropolitanism remains undertheorised. Afropolitanism, inspired by the concept of cosmopolitanism, includes an explicit link to the African continent, which may result in promoting racialised and territorialised biases. It is also often conceived as an identity position, which tends to result, first, in unfruitful debates on who qualifies as 'Afropolitan' and, secondly, in generating critical interest in a mere handful of 'Afropolitan' star authors. This article argues that, instead of introducing a 'new' concept, it would be more useful to continue to revisit the concept of cosmopolitanism in order to explore its potentials in the analysis of African literatures.

Bye-Bye Barack: dislocating Afropolitanism, spectral Marxism and dialectical disillusionment in two Obama-era novels

“…260-261) The levity of Obama's first paragraph is offset by a more sobering evaluation of American Dream narratives inflected by longer, invariably darker histories of imperialist exploitation and violence. This once again echoes some of the most incisive, because genealogically-committed treatises on 'the fashionable, yet problematic, concept of Afropolitanism,' particularly its airbrushing of socioeconomic class (Toivanen, 2017, p. 189. See Coetzee et al 2019.…”

Minna Salamin kerronnallisen aktivismin keinot

“…esim. Dabiri 2016;Gehrmann 2016, Toivanen 2017 Myös afropolitanismin samankaltaisuutta kosmopolitanismin kanssa on arvosteltu. Ainoana erona kosmopolitanismiin on nähty afropoliittisuuden edellyttämä kirjailijan, bloggarin tai tutkijan afrikkalainen syntyperä, mikä on ongelmallista essentialismin näkökulmasta (ks.…”

Passersby: The Politics and Poetics of Afropolitanism

“…57 Another major line of criticism concerns the need to create a special term to denote African cosmopolitans, which has been seen as, on the one hand, placing Africans outside the general history of humanity 58 and, on the other, "promoting territorialised and potentially racialised biases" by tying the concept exclusively to the African continent. 59 Perhaps the most pertinent critique concerns the notion's elitism and the difference between imagined Afropolitans and actual Africans; as Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie points out, in contrast to the freedom of movement enjoyed by Afropolitans, there is "no immigration policy anywhere in the Western world that welcomes Africans," but there is ample "evidence of major bias against African global mobility." 60 Ultimately, as Maximilian Feldner warns, "The problem of Afropolitanism is […] that the emphasis on its members' jetting across the globe can serve to cover over other, less auspicious, forms of African migration, such as the attempts to get into Europe by travelling through the Sahara and by boat across the Mediterranean Sea."…”