Afropolitanism — A Contested Field and Its Trajectories

Is Afropolitanism ... a signifier that is always excessive? ... For now, that remains undecided — but that is the beauty of it. ... In my judgement, we are at the beginning of a kind of questioning process....

My own sense is that these are two different types of imagining Afropolitanism. The non-elite group lives Afropolitanism through the imagination and the elite group lives Afropolitanism as an experience of being born across boundaries. Each group faces challenges. (chapter 2, 'The Authors in Conversation with Simon Gikandi')

As suggested in the opening pages of this book, Afropolitanism is a highly contentious field of study that has yet to mature into a comprehensive set of founding ideas that proponents as well as opponents can accept to work from as a bipartisan common ground. Some vouch for it, others emphatically do not. In our search for the figure of the Afropolitan in literary narratives we need, of course, to clear the ground on which we search and this must necessarily extend beyond the literary realm into theoretical and critical evaluations of Afropolitanism itself. Is Afropolitanism an enabling or an evasive term? Is it an empty signifier so loosely and openly conceived that it can absorb almost everything and so mean nothing specific at all, or is it a sliding or 'fat' signifier that is flexible enough to allow for continuous negotiations of its meaning? Kwame Anthony Appiah suggests the latter, but also adds that the fatness 'comes at the expense of a kind of coherence' because when a signifier is negotiable 'the fatness gives you lots to negotiate about' which will invariably create 'misunderstandings if you are operating under a label without recognising that other people have different understandings of it' (chapter 6, 'The Authors in Conversation with Kwame Anthony Appiah'). We agree with Appiah, but also consider this fatness to be part of the attraction of the term and its inclusive gestures, as suggested by Simon Gikandi in the epigraph above. If the challenge is to debunk outmoded and stale images of Africa and the African that urgently require renewal, or at the very least re-contemplation, Afropolitanism presents an advantageous position.

However, as a purportedly enabling way of studying African-derived culture in global contexts, in what specific ways is it new and can we point to a trajectory or a history for the term that provides sufficiently sustainable grounds for embracing it as a convincing approach to twenty-first-century global African culture? And if it is not only to be defined as a space of inquiry but also as an identity position, what characterises such an identity and why is it so contested? The field of Afropolitanism is still an emerging one and there is no easy way into such a space and an understanding of such an identity position. Thus, we take the long and winding road and attempt in this chapter to survey the open but contested field from which all chapters in this book take their cue. We begin by exploring Afropolitanism against Appiah's notion of cosmopolitanism before we move on to consider current theorisations and critiques of Afropolitanism. Then we consider a possible theoretical trajectory for Afropolitan ideas and finally explore the issue of identity from a cosmopolitan perspective that, unlike the models offered by more conventional identity thinking, can more fully illuminate the Afropolitan experience.

The challenges of belonging in and to the global age are manifold, in particular because increased mobility has not engendered a borderless world — far from it. Nevertheless, World Wide Web flows have shrunk distances between continents, nations, cultures, and peoples in unprecedented ways that make transcultural interaction and dialogue not only more immediately possible, but also absolutely imperative. Yet, under what rubric should we address such challenges, asks Appiah: 'Not "globalisation" [itself] ... that seem[s] to encompass everything, and nothing. Not "multiculturalism," another shape shifter, which so often designates the disease it purports to cure' (2007: xi). Appiah suggests that cosmopolitanism is a useful rubric, not in any elitist sense — as a celebratory 'unpleasant posture of superiority to the putative provincial' (2007: xi) — but as a habit of co-existence or a common conversational mode of interaction and exchange across boundaries and differences that stimulate recognition and responsibility. In Appiah's re-warped form, the goal of cosmopolitanism is not to reach consensus (on values and beliefs or morals); rather the basic premise of Appiah's cosmopolitan ideal is that 'we can, at best, agree to differ' (2007: 11). A cosmopolitan, in accordance with the etymology of the word, is 'a citizen of the world.' This can indeed be a trying position because it is at the same time a metaphorical and a grounded one. As it invokes both 'universal concern and respect for legitimate difference' (2007: xiii), the cultural outlook of a contemporary cosmopolitan may, when standing the test of being practised, put combined universal and local allegiances under pressure. What is particular about Appiah's sense of cosmopolitanism, however, is that it insists on intertwining the two spheres of universal and local in the conception of global citizenship. As fellow humans we have obligations to other humans that reach beyond those of our closest affiliations, but at the same time we are also obliged to observe and respect the value of individual human lives and the locally anchored and culture-specific values that shape them. Appiah advocates cosmopolitan ideas, or rather ideals, which may be anchored in national or local communities, but which reach beyond their boundaries. Although nations, or ethnic or racial communities, carry significant weight in shaping cosmopolitan citizens, 'no local loyalty can ever justify forgetting that each human being has responsibilities to every other' (Appiah 2007: xiv). Even if Appiah's vision can be accused of eclipsing rather expediently the issues of inequality and racialisation that still permeate global discourses across boundaries, he does trace his ideas back to his own upbringing in Africa:

In the final message my father left for me and my sisters, he...