(PDF) How Afropolitanism Unworlds the African World

This chapter establishes a continuity between the global consecration of foundational African literature and the framing and possibility of its derivative Afropolitan writing as world literature. Apart from literary history, I pay attention to the cosmopolitanism evoked in the idea of the Afropolitan, to complex identity formations, to commodity fetishism, to changing trends in Western academic criticism, as well as to material conditions of literary production and reception and the question of audience (Adesokan 2012 , Julien 2006), in locating how Afropolitan writing becomes world literature. However, I also submit that contemporary Afropolitanism's futuristic (Gikandi 2011) "Post-Colonial," as distinct from postcolonial, gaze (Shohat 1992, McClintock 1992) is problematic because it ideologically distances any Afropolitan body of work away from Africa's global geopolitical, social and economic history (Parry 1999).

Afropolitan Literature as World Literature i Literatures as World Literature Can the literature of a specific country, author, or genre be used to approach the elusive concept of “world literature”? Literatures as World Literature takes a novel approach to world literature by analyzing specific constellations—according to language, nation, form, or theme—of literary texts and authors in their own world-literary dimensions. World literature is obviously so vast that any view of it cannot help but be partial; the question then becomes how to reduce the complex task of understanding and describing world literature. Most treatments of world literature so far either have been theoretical and thus abstract, or else have made broad use of exemplary texts from a variety of languages and epochs. The majority of critical work, the filling in of what has been traced, lies ahead of us. Literatures as World Literature fills in the devilish details by allowing scholars to move outward from their own areas of specialization, fostering scholarly writing that approaches more closely the polyphonic, multiperspectival nature of world literature. Series Editor: Thomas O. Beebee Editorial Board: Eduardo Coutinho, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil Hsinya Huang, National Sun-yat Sen University, Taiwan Meg Samuelson, University of Cape Town, South Africa Ken Seigneurie, Simon Fraser University, Canada Mads Rosendahl Thomsen, Aarhus University, Denmark ii Volumes in the Series German Literature as World Literature Edited by Thomas O. Beebee Roberto Bolaño as World Literature Edited by Nicholas Birns and Juan E. De Castro Crime Fiction as World Literature Edited by David Damrosch, Theo D’haen, and Louise Nilsson Danish Literature as World Literature Edited by Dan Ringgaard and Mads Rosendahl Thomsen From Paris to Tlön: Surrealism as World Literature By Delia Ungureanu American Literature as World Literature Edited by Jeffrey R. Di Leo Romanian Literature as World Literature Edited by Mircea Martin, Christian Moraru, and Andrei Terian Brazilian Literature as World Literature Edited by Eduardo F. Coutinho Dutch and Flemish Literature as World Literature Edited by Theo D’haen Afropolitan Literature as World Literature Edited by James Hodapp Modern Indian Literature as World Literature (forthcoming) Edited by Bhavya Tiwari Francophone Literature as World Literature (forthcoming) Edited by Christian Moraru, Nicole Simek, and Bertrand Westphal iii iv Afropolitan Literature as World Literature Edited by James Hodapp v BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2020 Volume Editor’s Part of the Work © James Hodapp Each chapter © Contributors Cover design by Simon Levy/Levy associates All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Hodapp, James, editor. Title: Afropolitan literature as world literature / edited by James Hodapp Other titles: Literatures as world literature. Description: New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. Series: Literatures as world literature | Includes bibliographical references and index. Summary: “Explores the disparate creative works that are characterized as “Afropolitan literature,” contextualizing them within the fundamental questions of world literature, such as translation, circulation, and cultural specificity while also examining Afropolitan ideology itself as a new African way of seeing and being.”-- Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2019026037 (print) | LCCN 2019026038 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501342585 (hardback) | ISBN 9781501342592 (epub) | ISBN 9781501342608 (pdf) Subjects: LCSH: African literature (English–History and criticism. | Comparative literature. Classification: LCC PR9340 .A686 2020 (print) | LCC PR9340 (ebook) | DDC 820.996—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019026037 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019026038 ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-4258-5 ePDF: 978-1-5013-4260-8 eBook: 978-1-5013-4259-2 Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters. vi CONTENTS 1 Introduction: Africa and the Rest James Hodapp 1 2 The Worlds of Afropolitan World Literature: Modeling Intra-African Afropolitanism in Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor’s Dust 13 Birgit Neumann 3 Strategic Label: Afropolitan Literature in Germany Anna von Rath 37 4 Afropolitanism and the Afro-Asian Diaspora in M. G. Vassanji’s And Home Was Kariakoo 57 Shilpa Daithota Bhat 5 “White Man’s Magic”: A. Igoni Barrett’s Blackass, Afropolitanism, and (Post)Racial Anxieties 71 Julie Iromuanya 6 Toward an Environmental Theory of Afropolitan Literature 85 Juan Meneses 7 How Afropolitanism Unworlds the African World Amatoritsero Ede 8 Afropolitan Aesthetics as an Ethics of Openness Chielozona Eze 103 131 9 Fingering the Jagged Grain: Rereading Afropolitanism (and Africa) in Taiye Selasi’s Ghana Must Go 151 Aretha Phiri vii viii CONTENTS 10 “Part Returnee and Part-Tourist”: The Afropolitan Travelogue in Noo Saro-Wiwa’s Looking for Transwonderland: Travels in Nigeria 167 M. Rocío Cobo-Piñero 11 “Something Covered But Not Hidden”: Obscurity in Teju Cole’s Oeuvre as an Afropolitan Way of Worlding 185 Julian Wacker 12 The Hesitant Local: The Global Citizens of Open City and Americanah 203 Lara El Mekkawi Notes on Contributors 219 Index 223 7 How Afropolitanism Unworlds the African World Amatoritsero Ede Introduction: Afropolitanism in the New World It is now common knowledge that modern African literature’s founding moment was a reaction to colonialism; it was a conversation with, a response and a “writing back” to, Empire (Griffiths et. al., 1989; Msiska, 2016). After official decolonization and flag independence, this body of writing then entered a Commonwealth phase as a precursor to becoming world literature. In cultural material terms the Western publishing industry, largely British Heinemann Educational Publishers—and others like UK’s Three Crown Press—was instrumental to that diffusion through its African Writers’ Series (Hill 1971, Lizarribar 1998, Currey 2003, Clarke 2003, Ibironke 2008). It is noteworthy that, in this discussion, oral literature and the “manuscript” stages of African verbal arts have been deliberately backgrounded to focus on the natural progression of literacy from reading to writing. This is especially significant for a literary corpus that is still relatively very recent. Moreover, literature in this chapter denotes writing in a European language— English in this instance. Moreover, it refers to only creative writing. This is in consonance with that understanding of literature as ‘imaginative’ writing, a notion of the literary which African and other writing inherited from the Romantic literary period in England (Eagleton 1983:16). This chapter establishes a continuity between the global consecration of foundational African literature and the framing and possibility of its derivative Afropolitan writing as world literature. Apart from literary history, I pay attention to the cosmopolitanism evoked in the idea of the 103 104 AFROPOLITAN LITERATURE AS WORLD LITERATURE Afropolitan, to complex identity formations, to commodity fetishism, to changing trends in Western academic criticism, as well as to material conditions of literary production and reception and the question of audience (Adesokan 2012, Julien 2006), in locating how Afropolitan writing becomes world literature. However, I also submit that contemporary Afropolitanism’s futuristic (Gikandi 2011) “Post-Colonial,” as distinct from postcolonial, gaze (Shohat 1992, McClintock 1992) is problematic because it ideologically distances any Afropolitan body of work away from Africa’s global geopolitical, social and economic history (Parry 1999). For example, new African writing considered to be Afropolitan does not engage itself with the historical effects of colonialism on the continent. It is in this negative sense Post-Colonial or “Past-Colonial.” The resulting generic postcolonialism performs a scission between the past and the present, resulting in “an astonishing sense of weightlessness with regard to the gravity of history” (Said 1993: 366–367). A close reading of such Afropolitaninclined works as We Need New Names (Bulawayo 2013)), Open City (Cole 2011) or Ghana Must Go (2013) preponderantly engages themes of migration, cosmopolitanism, and diasporization as the horizon to which characterisation tends. While plot, theme, and narration might engage the existential struggles of characters in a cultural materialist manner, the larger colonialist ontology behind these are never focalized; they are eclipsed in favor of an immediate, text-bound, rather than an historical verisimilitude. To highlight the ideological disconnection between Afropolitan aesthetics and a heretofore universal African literary ethics, I juxtapose the idea of the Afropolitan with the concept of the Afropean in Francophone African literary scholarship. I conclude that it is because of an Afropolitan literary futurism—which corrupts the ontological “worlding” potential of Afropolitan writing as world literature due to a lack of an ideological commitment to the African continent—that the existential query then arises, “what is a world”? (Cheah 2016). That is the question this chapter concludes with in relation to Africa’s place inside and outside of globalization. In other words, I apprehend the “world” in “world literature” in two ways. One sense is that of the usual literal understanding of it as “all literary works that circulate beyond their culture of origin, either in translations or in their original languages” (Damrosch 2003: 4). The other sense is that of an existential permutation of the literal one and begs the questions—what “ontological worlding,” that is, what world-making or positive ideological impact—does the global circulation or “literary worlding” of the Afropolitan text have? Does such a text change the subject’s perception of the objective world or impact the history of ideas on the continent and in the African and Black Diaspora at all or in any significant way? These are questions central to this chapter’s consideration of Afropolitanism itself as an idea. Perhaps it is useful to briefly consider why the Afropolitan is implicated in the burden of a traumatic African past for which he or she is not directly HOW AFROPOLITANISM UNWORLDS THE AFRICAN WORLD 105 responsible. The distant history of slavery and a relatively immediate colonialism both indirectly and directly resulted in an African textual contestation of Euro-modernity in novelistic and essayistic-critical forms. Present day continental Africans and those in the old and new African diasporas of the Euro-Americas are implicated, willy-nilly, in that history. This is because it has had a great impact on, and continues to shape, their present. Repressed pasts return into the present as slippages of global and local economic, social, cultural, and political domination of Africa and its diasporas. This is immediately tangible in the form of a proliferation of right-wing parties in the EU or an anti-Black racism in the metropolis—so much so that there is, for example, a renewed civil rights struggle in contemporary USA referred to as the Black Lives Matter Movement (Sterling 2015). In the case of Africa’s immediate colonial history Leela Ghandi has this to say: Postcolonial nation states are often deluded and unsuccessful in their attempts to disown the burdens of their colonial inheritance. The mere repression of colonial memories is never, in itself, tantamount to a surpassing of or emancipation from the uncomfortable realties of the colonial encounter. (1998: 4) The neurotic repression of the past referred to above is discernible in the Afropolitan or Afropean writer. The writer, scholar, or thinker, as a moulder of public thought and social reality, would be irresponsible to refuse to engage such a past. This is why Chinua Achebe insists that an African writer (and by extension the Afropolitan or Afropean) cannot afford the indulgence of art-for-art’s sake unlike his British or American counterpart with a radically different past (1975:19). Otherwise, the result will be a perpetuation of that crisis of consciousness which has informed African literature from its inception (Onoge 1974) and now invades Afropolitan writing. That crisis of consciousness, it can be argued, is at the root of the double-consciousness, which overdetermines the identity crisis of Afropolitan or Afropean subjectivity. Before I proceed, there is a need to delimit the range of the discussion here. I reiterate that the term world literature as applied to Afropolitan writing vis-à-vis other world literatures is not understood in a hierarchical or comparative literature framework. It merely signifies the traveling text as a cultural object dis-embedded from its initial site of literary production and bridging local and global readerships. Or put differently, the emphasis in this chapter is about how Afropolitan writing becomes world literature in largely “world-making” terms. Otherwise, any kind of juxtaposing will be in relationship to how contemporary Afropolitan writing compares in ideological worlding terms to its precursor in the Black Atlantic. In short, 106 AFROPOLITAN LITERATURE AS WORLD LITERATURE the objective is not to provide proof that Afropolitan literature is world literature because it obviously now is—as witnessed by the recent wealth of academic and popular engagement of the topic. Since 2005 when Taiye Selasi first deployed the neologism, “Afropolitan,” in her online article in the Lip magazine, there has been an explosion in popular discussions and academic criticism of the phenomenon. This has been accompanied and exacerbated by an increasing production of celebrated novels which demonstrate and give credence to the subjectivity and consciousness referenced by the term. An important corollary to the major world-making concern above is this chapter’s thesis that any contemporary Afropolitan literary worlding process, resulting from transnational publishing and print capitalism as it does, is shadowed by the cultural producer’s conscious or unconscious ideological unworlding of the African world due, I argue, to an apolitical, market-driven self-positioning within the field of cultural production. I proceed by positing and historicizing the original Afropolitan figure as the enslaved or formerly enslaved Black New World writer, intellectual, artist, citizen and—by dint of her or his erudition and cosmopolitan ‘worldliness’ —renaissance woman or man. This is, for example, the freedman or emancipated slave in Europe and the Americas, who foreshadowed his or her contemporary incarnation—the twenty-first century Afropolitan writer of a relatively more recent African and Black diaspora and with a more immediate continental genealogy. That proposition will be much clearer presently. After Europe imagined Africa in the medieval period as a place of fantasy and desire (Hochschild 1998:1), the latter’s unwilling insertion into modernity began in 1441 with slave raids on the African coast by Portuguese sailors, Antão Gonçalves and Nuno Tristão.1 They captured twelve free African men in Cabo Branco, modern Mauritania, and took them to Portugal as chattel slaves. Another Portuguese, a tax collector called Lançarote de Freitas, formed a company in Lagos, a city in Portugal, in 1444. His goal, in the seminal euphemistic language for European invasion of Africa was to “trade”—in this instance again with coastal Mauritania. He initiated this “trade” by, again, kidnapping 235 Africans on August 8 the same year and bringing them to Lagos in Portugal. It is presumable that this initial European vigilantism on the African coast then created and fueled the oxymoron, “slave trade,” which seized the European imagination and exacerbated original medieval fantasies about the continent. The subterfuge of “trade” was legitimized when a sitting Pope, Nicholas V, decreed through two papal Bulls—the Dum Divas on June 18, 1452 and the Romanus pontifex on January 8, 1454—the enabling of Portuguese enslavement of “non-Christians,” on the one hand, and the conferring of a “trade” monopoly with Africa to the Portuguese, on the other. However, that “native Africa” that Europe desired in the language of trade was a HOW AFROPOLITANISM UNWORLDS THE AFRICAN WORLD 107 dehumanized and an enslaved non-partner initially oblivious of any trade agreements, or of the fact that it was being traded with. How does one go into a trade agreement with, or as, a “commodity”? And long after slavery was “officially” abolished (in 1807 in the UK and 1863 in the USA) or rather when it ended due to a complex of political and economic forces as well as to a changing social order and mode of production (Fogel and Engerman 1974), the rhetoric of “trade” intensified and was a subterfuge for the colonial desire and actual physical colonialism that succeeded slavery. The historic conspiracy between capitalism—in so far as “trading” in slaves was for the purpose of generating capital (Williams 1944)—and Christianity was consolidated by the church’s embrace of a “Hamitic principle” (Goldenberg 2003), which declared African people to be the descendants of the cursed biblical Ham. That pervasive, dehumanizing, Judeo-Christian medieval European sentiment “authorized” by Papal Bulls (Hood 1994) prefigured the Ur-Afropolitan as a cosmopolitan personage in the New World metropolis, an article of the “trade” in “slave trade,” who was initially spirited across the Trans-Atlantic Ocean in the belly of the slave ship. It must be noted that an “Out of Africa” thesis by Paleoanthropologists such as Mary Leakey and Louis Leakey (see Johanson et. al. 1990), Egyptologists (Obenga 2004), Historians (Bernal 1987 Vol. 1–3; Diop 1974), Anthropological Geneticists (Cheng2 et al. 2005), and Black Historians (Sertima 1994; Rashidi 1992) could infinitely defer the beginning of an Afropolitan worldliness. However, the Trans-Atlantic slave trade was the first recorded massive movement of people out of Africa antecedent to the modern period. Moreover, it is significant that this particular migration was accompanied by prodigious literary production. The kind of cosmopolitanism or worldliness in question at the intersection of world literature is one that is enlarged by Black Atlantic Letters, of which there was a proliferation during slavery as exemplified in the Slave Narrative, in moral criticism, in private letters or in Philosophical and legal disquisition.3 The significance of the history of African deracination above is that the forced and violent displacement of that Ur-Afropolitan figure from the continent to the New World and the ensuing dispersal across the Northern Hemisphere is symbolic of an “unworlding” of the Black or African world. It is noteworthy that in this chapter, the qualifiers, “Black” and “African” will be deployed interchangeably as synonyms due to their continuous and very much intertwined historical identities. The one emphasizes an initial six-centuries-old New World diasporization beginning in 1441 and, the other, an unbroken continental presence or a more recent and unforced emigration, of which today’s Afropolitans an Afropeans are a product. It might now be apparent that I will be deploying the term “unworlding,” and, by extension, its corollary “worlding,” in two respective senses in turn—one material and, the other, symbolic. That is this chapter’s primary 108 AFROPOLITAN LITERATURE AS WORLD LITERATURE understanding of them. In these arguments a worlding is any obviously positive historical, organic, that is, material denaturing or alteration process, which progressively changes the environment, and thereby, physical reality and the social life-world in a slow but drastic and permanent manner. A similar material process that is nevertheless negative in its physical and environmental effects constitute an “unworlding.” Such a denaturing or alteration process through ideological, aesthetic, or means other than the organic and material, which affects subjectivities and their perception of objective reality in a permanent fashion, is a measure of a symbolic worlding or unworlding respectively, depending on whether the effect is positive or negative. In Africa’s Longue durée both a material and symbolic unworlding is remarkable in the historical deterritorialization of bodies and objects involved in slavery and colonialism, on the one hand, and in the psychic alienation and temporal unyoking of Africa from its original existential trajectory, on the other. In my usage these phenomena are also connoted in the contemporary results of modern African history: in a material unworlding sense, continental geographical fragmentation, dislocation, and dispersal of peoples as well as a broad and current economic over-dependency on the West—and more recently on China; and in a symbolic unworlding sense, an internalized alienation in the modern African subject. He or she is, for example, Christianized or Islamized to the detriment of original spiritualties and generally de-cultured—it can be argued—in certain important areas of psychic and material life. It is possible to consider especially Islam (or even Christianity) as having been long domesticated in Africa. Nevertheless, both religions were, and still are, conquering, disruptive, and domineering forces—and particularly so when juxtaposed with traditional African religions which they have violently demonized and repressed. This, of course, is a purview beyond the fact that cultures are, indeed, never in isolation nor are they hermetically sealed away from each other (Friedman 1997, 15). The contention is that it is only in instances of a super-ordination of one culture over and above another one, which subsequently becomes (therefore) alienated from itself, that such excesses of a cultural encounter become remarkably negative and insidious in its effect on self-constitution, resulting in an unworlding of the subject and host world. It is due to the alienating effect of modern African history that this chapter’s immediate consideration of Afropolitan literature is in relation to its (im)possibilities as an agent of self-recovery and continental re-worlding. In other words, I consider whether Afropolitanism possesses symbolic worlding effect in terms of its ideological and aesthetic appeals. The hallmark of contemporary Afropolitanism in the metropolis is that it enables social and class mobility through the human agency accruing from the symbolic capital of the Afropolitan writer’s work (Ede 2016). This is, HOW AFROPOLITANISM UNWORLDS THE AFRICAN WORLD 109 indeed, a worlding event even if it is on a personal, apolitical and individualized rather than a universal level. However, there is a larger historical sense in which it can be suggested that the freedman or emancipated slave was the original Afropolitan—in terms, not only of those personages’ worldliness or cosmopolitanism but—especially due to the universal rather than personal, humanizing force of their creativity. I refer to such cosmopolitan New World writers (Potkay and Burr 1995) in the Black Atlantic like Oluadah Equiano (1745–1797), Ignatius Sanchos (1729–1780), Quobna Otobah Cugoano (c. 1775), Phyllis Wheatley (1753–1784), Anton Wilhelm Amo (1703–c.1759), James Africanus Bearle Horton (1835–1883), James Weldon Johnson (1871–1938), Edward Blyden (1832–1912), Joseph Ephraim Casely-Hayford (1866–1930), Adelaide Casely-Hayford (1868– 1960) or Samuel Johnson4 (1846–1901). The works of the above-mentioned Black Atlantic writers and artists of the eighteenth century (Gates Jr. and Andrews 1998) was far-reaching and universal in their politically liberating and humanizing effect across the Black and, subsequently, African world. Slave narratives and, eventually, other artistic forms such as Jazz, created a Black human agency through what I refer to as an aesthetic abolitionism (July 1968: 35). There is a clear and poignant contemporary example of the representational force of human agency vis-à-vis Blackness conveyed through the very recent American film, Black Panther, which re-worlds the African or Black subject and world positively as differentiated from a historically demonizing and static or progressively negative perennial media representation in most publics around the globe (Kanneh 1998, 31). Irrespective of any representational short-comings in the Black Panther film—its cinematic over-compression of space, for example—what is crucial here is the fact of its desperate longing for an African Utopia. The urgency and upsurge of that humanizing aesthetic tradition and counter Euro-modern symbolic Black worlding, which began with Black Atlantic Slave narratives in the eighteenth century—and was long preceded by the material worlding of slave rebellions in previous epochs—enabled twentieth century Black internationalism (Edwards 2001; Erbune and Braddock 2005). This was an overarching cultural mass movement along and across the original Transatlantic slave routes but in a reverse direction—from the Black Atlantic into Africa in this instance. In other words, that umbrella movement localized itself in the Western hemispheric nexus of France, America, the Caribbean, and Britain, with the city of Paris as its confluence, and with its influence reaching into the continent and engendering a liberating politics. Black Internationalism’s Black micro-politics and cultural network flowed into Africa and ignited the black consciousness movement (Fatton 1986) and anti-colonial agitation, both of which re-worlded Africa in their material and symbolic aspects, with the symbolic informing a foundational decolonizing, politically conscious, first-generation African writing. 110 AFROPOLITAN LITERATURE AS WORLD LITERATURE This meant that the triangular trade came full-circle with a triangular repossession—at least of physical land (through flag independence), of body to a large extent, and of mind (but in a fragmented, ambivalent manner). With Paris as the cultural capital of the Western world in the nineteenth century (Benjamin 1968), it was also naturally the cultural capital of the Black Diaspora in the twentieth due to the presence of a large congregation of the old Black Diaspora with new world linkages and new ones made up of the colonized drawn massively by educational and other assimilationist attractions of the French “mother” country. Hence the expression in Francophone African studies, “Black Paris,” (Jules-Rosette 1993) announces that historic European city as a centripetal locus for early twentieth century Black Atlantic and African counter-cultural movements like Negritude (Irele 1965a, 1965b), the Harlem Renaissance (Huggins 1975), and Indigeneity and Negrismo (Jahn 1968). Premised on the assertion above that Afropolitanism began in an eighteenth century New World, proliferating within early twentieth century Black Internationalism and that it is not just a completely new phenomenon, an overview of the prevailing contemporary popular and theoretical understanding of Afropolitanism as praxis and lived experience is pertinent. From the moment of what I will like to refer to as a “resurgence” of an Afropolitan consciousness through that phenomenon’s annunciation with Taiye Selasi’s 2005 online article, “Bye-Bye Babar,” and Achille Mbembe ([2006] 2007; 2010) as well as Simon Gikandi’s (2011) theoretical deepening and reconfiguration of that rather journalistic beginning, Afropolitanism as a form of self-consciousness has been presented as if it were a totally new experience. Nevertheless, the question of subjectivity that is central to every single popular interpretation or scholarly disquisition on Afropolitanism all insinuate a very basic human condition—movement and migration, consequent upon which the subject’s self-consciousness about, and experience of, foreignness results in an identity politics. That idea of movement is discernible in the sub-text of, for example, the very important intervention on the topic in a special issue of the Journal of African Cultural Studies (28.1, 2016) or in Jennifer Wawrzinek—and J.K.S. Makokha-edited Negotiating Afropolitanism (2011), directly in Simon Gikandi’s introduction to the latter volume and very clearly in Mbembe’s seminal theoretical contribution. Movement involves endless human migration and mixing, diasporization, alienation and dislocation to varying degrees across human history. Mbembe mirrors that condition with the expression, “worlds in movement” ([2006] 2007: 26). He is specifically discussing Euro-Asian movement into Africa over centuries and the question of the ambivalence and instability of African settlers’ cultural self-identity—this is an aspect of a modern continental Afropolitanism that still needs much future discussion. The kind of movement relevant to this reflection is that one which led to Africa’s first HOW AFROPOLITANISM UNWORLDS THE AFRICAN WORLD 111 major and modern Diaspora. It is the result of a continentally outward— and not the inward-bound movement simultaneously emphasized in the 2007 English translation, “Afropolitanism,” of Mbembe’s 2006 essay. An invariably self-willed or colonial-capitalist, invading or conquering, Africabound migration is still benign in juxtaposition with the epic trauma of the New World deracination that is in question. Deracination to a transatlantic environment presupposes the effects of migration enumerated above but, more positively, a historically concomitant Pan-Africanism that should be central to the Afropolitan experience rather than the embracing of routes without a commitment to roots that is one of the signatures of contemporary Afropolitanism. Were it not for its elitism, and its staunchly ahistorical mood, Afropolitanism would wholeheartedly embrace it if only because Pan-Africanism “is a movement predicated on the construction of blackness and African-ness that presupposes a commonality in suffering faced by all Black peoples due to slavery, racial discrimination, colonial exploitation, and the movements for decolonization, which in turn, allows for a common form of identification that nullifies geographic, ethnic, social, cultural, and class differences” (Sterling 2015: 129). In view of the violent removal involved in slavery, the “movement” in Mbembe’s “worlds in movement” when applied to an African deracination beginning in 1441 becomes tantamount to an “unworlding” of the African world, which is defined above as a forced deterritorialization of bodies and objects. It is also in the same sense of their materiality that New World slave rebellions and, African material and symbolic anti-colonial activities respectively, would constitute historical efforts at a material or symbolic worlding. From the foregoing, Africa’s first modern Diaspora consisted of the slave in the New World. This translates into the fact that a massive movement of black peoples across the Atlantic Ocean created the first African cosmopolitans in modern times. And especially after abolition and emancipation these cosmopolitans became Ur-Afropolitans due, not just to their African self-identification, but—more importantly—to an enduring Pan-African sensibility reflected in eighteenth and nineteenth century Black Atlantic metropolitan letters. These writers made sure to announce their Africanness as paratexts in the prelims or in the titling, of their works. Oluadah Equaino’s attestation is bold in the titling of his autobiography as The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African (1789). Other examples are Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, humbly submitted to the inhabitants of Great-Britain by Ottobah Cugoano, a native of Africa (1787), Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho: An African, to which are Prefixed, Memoirs of his Life, (1782). In all these writings there is an affirmation of the authors’ “Africanness.” 112 AFROPOLITAN LITERATURE AS WORLD LITERATURE That is an historical contradiction in relation to the contemporary Afropolitan who is quick to apologize, as it were, for his or her Africanness and declare fervently that “I am not an African Writer!” (Adesokan 2012)— irrespective of high-sounding excuses for such declarations. In equal weight to the above subjective African self-identification, Black Atlantic UrAfropolitan Pan-Africanism also objectively pervades the spirit and thematic concern of the slave narrative—that of the equality of the African as human being and a contestation of an ironic anti-enlightenment, anti-rationalist institution of slavery. Afropolitan Writing as World literature? The significance of the above arguments in relationship to Afropolitan writing as world literature is that Afropolitanism in the New World possessed a nascent Pan-Africanist consciousness while contemporary Afropolitanism is not necessarily Pan-Africanist, if not totally against the idea. That detachment is only further underscored if, in different contexts, Biyanvanga Wainaina, Chimamanda Adichie (Santana 2016:120–121), and Yewande Omotosho (Fasselt 2014) reject the Afropolitan interpellation. They eschew the identity politics that has become part of the new Western consecrating rubric for contemporary African writing. New writers have instinctively internalized the narrative expectation of Western literary establishments and produce corresponding work. This could be, on the one hand, in the mode of a “strategic exoticism” (Huggan 2001: 32). Graham Huggan (2001) explains it as “the means by which postcolonial writers/thinkers, working from within exoticist [Western] codes of representation, either manage to subvert those codes . . . or succeed in redeploying them for the purposes of uncovering differential relations of power” (32). On the other hand, it could be in the semblance of a strategic exoticism steeped in narratives of migration, diasporization, cosmopolitanism, estrangement, dislocation, and alienation typical of most Afropolitan fiction. Pan-Africanism has a significance for the ability of either Ur-Afropolitan writing or its contemporary variation to world the Black and African world. I referred above to New World’s Pan-Africanism as “nascent” because it predated the organized and formal Pan-Africanism of the mid-nineteenth to early and late-twentieth centuries, which united Black Atlantic (including African-American, Caribbean, Black British) and continental African intellectuals, politicians as well as anti-colonial activists and visionaries within the Black cultural movements discussed previously, with Paris as their “cultural capital” in the twentieth century. A nascent New World PanAfricanism is what became a highly organized, visible, centralized and documented variation with a clear cultural mandate in other eras. HOW AFROPOLITANISM UNWORLDS THE AFRICAN WORLD 113 In foregrounding the worlding possibilities of an erstwhile Pan-Africanistinflected writing—without necessarily prescribing it as a formula for the present—the significance of the descriptive, “world literature” in relationship to contemporary Afropolitanism will then be African writing that ideologically signifies a positive material, existential, or symbolic re/worlding of the world it encounters towards Black agency. Such writing’s reconstructive and rehabilitative effect would reconfigure the subject’s consciousness and apprehension of things, thereby reducing the alienating effect of history, reordering a normalized perception of objective reality and lead to a revolution in ideas and a general socio-political, cultural and, in indirect relation, economic, transformation. My argument is that contemporary alienated Afropolitan writing does not reflect any potential for that worlding possibility described immediately above. However, New World Afropolitan writing achieved it and is in this sense a “world literature”—a literature that positively re/worlds the world it encounters. It is equally a world literature in the sense of its literary-historical provenance—wide-spread, consecration, circulation, dissemination, and expansive readership in the Atlantic world, all these emphasised by its endurance as celebrated slave narrative text in contemporary times. New Afropolitanism is synonymous with world literature not in the sense of a symbolic worlding but only in the sense of a very recent twenty-first century literary circulation. Moreover, as proof of its remarkable worlding efficacy and the universality of its humanizing Black agency, Black Atlantic Writing contributed in large part to a radical New World social contract. It aided the abolition of slavery and, in historical succession via Black internationalism, distantly ushered in a decolonial era in Africa. In a manner of speaking then, decolonization, arguably, has its provenance in New World aesthetic abolitionism. It is an irony of history that aesthetic abolitionism was largely responsible for, and enabled, in the Longue durée, the political freedoms and ease of access to the cultural capital, and in effect also the symbolic capital, now enjoyed by an ideologically uncommitted contemporary Afropolitan; freedoms which slaves won with great personal sacrifice: Education for slaves was generally proscribed and after the slave rebellions of the 1820s and 1830s, especially Nat Turner’s rebellion in 1831, most of the Southern states passed codes explicitly prohibiting the teaching of reading and writing to slaves. Nat Turner was literate and the connection between reading and writing and rebellion was well recognized. LIVINGSTON 1976: 247 The material worlding suggested in the slave’s physical agitation, rebellions and struggle to acquire an ability to read and write was a prerequisite for 114 AFROPOLITAN LITERATURE AS WORLD LITERATURE transitioning to a symbolic worlding through aesthetic form. In this instance that form was writing and, the eventual literary consecration that imbued the freed slave with human agency and destroyed the rationalist fallacy that the slave could neither think nor had cognition. This was one of the proslavery arguments during the abolitionist debate of the 1800s as it is evident in the literature. For example, in the introduction to a special issue of Critical Enquiry on the interweaving between racial (in)equality and writing, Henry Louis Gate Jr. eloquently recounts the politics of literacy and human agency in the Black Atlantic. He underscores this by recalling the very public examination of an adolescent Phyllis Wheatley (1753–1784), whose first collection of poetry, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773), was met with incredulity by the white “metropolitan public” (Ede 2016: ), whose leading political and intellectual representatives now interviewed the 18-year-old in a town hall towards the purpose of ascertaining that she was not a literary fraud and, more importantly, that a slave could indeed possess the specialized rational skills and high faculty required for creative writing. Gates’ explanation for a Western valorization of reason in relationship to being human or less—that is, being a “slave,” is worth quoting at some length: Why was the creative writing of the African of such importance to the eighteenth century’s debate over slavery? I can briefly outline one thesis: after Rene Descartes, reason was privileged, or valorized, above all other human characteristics. Writing, especially after the printing press became so widespread, was taken to be the visible sign of reason. Blacks were reasonable, and hence men, if-and only if-they demonstrated mastery of the arts and sciences, the eighteenth century’s formula for writing. So, while the Enlightenment is characterized by its foundation on man’s ability to reason, it simultaneously used the absence and presence of reason to delimit and circumscribe the very humanity of the cultures and people of color which Europeans had been discovering since the Renaissance. (1985: 8) The public assessment of Phillis Wheatley was, in a manner of speaking, a literary competition involving only one candidate—herself as representative of Blackness. After passing her “test,” the metropolitan, agency-inducing consecration and literary prestige which accrued to Wheatley is part of what makes her an Ur-Afropolitan alongside new Afropolitan writers such as Taiye Selasi, Teju Cole, Kofi Effoui or Jean Luc Raharimanana. I have argued elsewhere that “consecration is a precondition for the effectiveness of agency” (Ede 2016). Wheatley was imbued with consecration after her “examination” and possessed agency, in the sense of Michael E. Bratman’s, idea of “individual autonomy, self-governance and agential HOW AFROPOLITANISM UNWORLDS THE AFRICAN WORLD 115 authority” (2007: 4). As a matter of course, that individual autonomy for a slave or freed man or woman was inversely proportional to the level of their freedom; however, possessing literary consecration and its accrued symbolic capital gave leverage to the slave’s political project of freedom and selfdetermination in a progressive manner as is now historically evident. That humanizing progression is what WEB Dubois most likely referenced in his 1903 essay where he insists, in a direct and related African-American context, that the advancement of the “race” would depend on a “talented tenth” of educated Black people. This is a small population who would be imbued with the necessary cultural capital that would translate into its cognate symbolic capital, with the combined effect being the accruing of agency and a positive material and symbolic worlding of the Black world. The New World “talented tenth”—in retrospect—Wheatley as well as other New World writers such as the aforementioned Equiano or Ignatius Sanchos, Quobna Otobah Cugoano or Anton Wilhelm Amo all wrote works that possessed illumination and were consecrated purveyors of human agency in the same sense in which contemporary Afropolitans’ works possesses these qualities too. Robert July (1968) has referred to New World writers as the “Eighteenth-century forerunners” (35) of African literature and intellection. As I have maintained here, these New World writers are also the forerunners of the contemporary Afropolitan writer. However, what differentiates the Ur-Afropolitan from the contemporary Afropolitan is that the former’s literary work has an historically poignant worlding effect on the Black or African world while the latter’s writings constitute a symbolic unworlding in its ideological rejection of roots and a Pan-Africanist lack— even when the writers do personally embrace, and novelize, routes. For new Afropolitanism, roots exist in the form of a self-distancing affiliation. A brief example will suffice in order keep within the limited scope of this chapter. The Afropolitan protagonist of Teju Cole’s Open City, Julius—psychiatrist, intellectual, and Renaissance man—embodies that self-distancing affiliation. Even though he accepts his African worldliness and acknowledges other Africans or Blacks in his peregrinations across New York city, that affirmation is couched in a demonstrated cynicism and superiority complex. So obvious it is to the young African-American street he encounters that it mugs him in his Afropolitan superciliousness, even though that street otherwise still ironically considers him a “brother.” “Somehow it was clear that they did not intend to kill me. There was an ease to their violence [. . .]. I was being beaten, but it was not severe, certainly not as severe as it could be if they were truly angry” (212–213). When Julius encounters Kenneth, a Black immigrant from the island of Bhabuda, who recognizes himself in the protagonist and sort solidarity in a normally informal restaurant environment, Julius is distant and haughty. This is because Kenneth, although Black like Julius, is not necessarily “Afropolitan” due to the former’s lack of any specialized artistic skills and 116 AFROPOLITAN LITERATURE AS WORLD LITERATURE accompanying metropolitan consecration as well as symbolic capital. This is insinuated in the novel’s sub-text, I suggest. As a janitor at the Folk-Art museum, Kenneth has a lower-class status imposed, as it were, by Julius, who discountenances this “brother’s” humanity. This is similar to, if not as drastic as, that dehumanized ontological condition, which New World Afropolitan writing focalized as unjust, as an unfreedom and a lack of agency that needed to be re-worlded. In denying him coeval-ness, in imposing an outward standard of being human in which Kenneth is “less-than,” Julius unhinges and unworlds Kenneth’s world; and a less-human self-perception is forced upon difference. “Kenneth was by now starting to wear on me, and I began to wish he would go away. I thought of the cabdriver who had driven me home from the Folk Art Museum—hey, I ’m African just like you. Kenneth was making the same claim” (53). In contradistinction to Afropolitan literature, foundational African writing, that is, first-generation African writing—for example those by Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, Hampate Ba, Leopold Senghor, or David Diop—maintained the worlding possibilities inherited from the Black Atlantic. It was directly instrumental to decolonization and led to the protest tradition—especially in Francophone African literature— against a self-legitimizing, post-independence African political bourgeoisie and its “presidents-for-life” syndrome (Ekeh, 1975; Adesanmi 2010). Those works contest, an attendant, and still, pervasive unworlding corruption of the postcolonial state (Bayart 1989, Chabal and Daloz 1999). It could be taken for granted that the contemporary African writer is not interested in being counted as one of Dubois’ talented tenth. He or she is individualized in the extreme and is apparently not enamored of a New World, Black Atlantic, or early-twentieth-century African group cohesion. This is due to the alienation induced by a distant and recent history. Afropolitan Writing as Commodity If, as already emphasized, contemporary Afropolitan writing is not world literature in symbolic worlding terms, then its material globalizing element is necessarily indistinguishable from its value as a commodity, both for the writer and the publisher—but especially for the Western reader, whose selfconstitution, it seems, depends on a perennial negative othering—especially of African difference. Kadiatu Kanneh frames that historical confrontation between European self and African Other thus: “Africa’s historical role in the formation of modernity, particularly as a discursive site for ideologies of race, humanity and progress, is one that helped to forge Europe’s idea of itself, as well as to lay the foundations of modern Black identities” (“History Africa and Modernity” 32). In contemporary times, that perennial Self/ Other dichotomy is at the heart of a demonizing variety of Western media HOW AFROPOLITANISM UNWORLDS THE AFRICAN WORLD 117 representation. “The [twentieth century] anticolonial struggles and internecine strife that characterize Africa’s place in the media and the frequent footage of famine, AIDS and ‘natural’ disasters perpetuate the image of the Dark Continent” (31). It is then not surprising that what has become the prize-winning staple for Western literary establishments are the “extroverted” (Julien 2006) negatively unidimensional stories about Africa sold to a willing primary target-audience in the Western metropolis. Such “single stories” include those of an exaggerated African patriarchy in Chimamanda Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus; the “exceptional” African “criminality” reflected in Tricia Nwaubani’s I Do Not Come to You by Chance, in NoViolet Bulawayo’s Caine-Prize-winning short story “Hitting Budapest”-’s (2005) hyperfocalization of poverty, child abuse, and neglect as well as its elaboration in that story’s novelization, We Need New Names (2011). The significance of a sensationalizing narration, uni-dimensional plotting and an ideological void in the Afropolitan novel is that such works become mere raw materials for the transnational publishing industry. These writers’ first audience becomes the Western reader as represented by the Western literary agent (Nwaubani 2014). In a macabre re-enactment of original African unworlding occasioned by the Slave Trade and colonialism, the relationship of writer and publisher to the continent becomes one in which Africa is objectified as mostly a source of raw material—with stories being the raw material in this instance. The significance is that having abandoned a traditional New World, Black Internationalist and early and late twentieth-century African ethical approach to literary representation, contemporary Afropolitan writing appeals to the Western reader’s consumption of Africa in an ocular regime (Adesanmi 2005: 270) in which Africa is an exotic and a strange spectacle. As a matter of course, there are exceptions to this stylistic trend such as Wainaina’s story, “Discovering Home” (2001) or Moses Isegawa’s novel, Abyssinian Chronicles (2001). Wainana’s story for example is set in Africa; its plot follows the trajectory of an internal exile as he navigates his way towards home across the continent. However, the market-driven stylistics of most new fiction genuflects to the commodification charge of some critics of Afropolitanism like Wainaina. The postcolonial exotic market logic of contemporary Afropolitan writing has been much discussed in the literature and bears no repetition here (Huggan 2001, Brouillette, Adesokan 2012, Ede 2015). The unworlding and commodifying relationship of the Afropolitan writer to his object is exacerbated in the Francophone African writer, that is, in the even more radically alienated “Afropean” based in Paris. An overt Afropean, as opposed to covert Afropolitan, rejection of roots is detailed in Odile Cazenave and Patricia Célérier’s 2011 study of commitment in Francophone African literature. They note that Afropeans are “weary of 118 AFROPOLITAN LITERATURE AS WORLD LITERATURE the label of ‘African writer’ and dissociate themselves from the notion of [ideologically or politically] engaged writing” (183). Importantly, this preference and valuing of aesthetics over ethics rather than their marriage as in foundational African literature is not necessarily a result of a postcolonial amnesia (Gandhi 1998). Rather it is reducible to a studied affectation that the Afropean, especially, cultivates and loudly celebrates as witnessed by Jean Luc Rahimanana. In his own words: We were only promising young authors . . . filled with revolt, with a desire to abscond from the legacies of our elders, a legacy that was hard to bear, the whole continent’s pain in fact. Our only wish was to write, to be good writers, to play with aesthetics or just tell a story, and here we were, twenty years old, and summoned to save Africa! CAZENAVE AND CÉLÉRIER 97 Perhaps the alienation and strong rejection of roots expressed in the above quote could be explained by John Nimis’ (2014) globalizing conception of the Afropean—the French-speaking African variation of the EnglishSpeaking Afropolitan: Afropean points to a group with dual cultural and political identities without any basis or investment in the national, either as a source of legitimacy or a target of resistance. The absence of a hyphen in the term therefore registers the integrity of human subjects, thus designating a seamless mixture and crossing, across distance and across imagined categories of humans (black and white). NIMIS 49 It is hard to quarrel with Nimis’ view and celebration of the transnational. However, it needs to be qualified by the fact that cultural hybridity is no buffer against observable negative political interpellation of blackness in the Western metropolis, that the novel is an ideological form and that an anti-national, alienated, de-politicized Afropean self-positioning is therefore a political act and leads to an unworlding of the African world, willy-nilly. This is ironic given the history of Black Paris as an early-twentieth-century locus of Black Atlantic struggle for emancipation and agency. Clearly, Afropolitan and Afropean writing are not world literature in symbolic worlding terms, as this chapter has been arguing. Their world literature status resides only in a global circulation that is invariably yoked to the literary worlding of foundational African literature as well as to the vicissitudes of the transnational literary market. The moment of the literary worlding of both Afropolitan and Afropean writing is therefore worth a brief overview. HOW AFROPOLITANISM UNWORLDS THE AFRICAN WORLD 119 Rise of the Afropolitan Novel As a summary,5 first generation African literature’s rise as world literature is invariably interwoven with the political urgency of decolonisation and that oeuvre’s international dissemination by William Heinemann publishers in the UK. Beginning in the early 1950s African writing’s literary worlding started as a flow into global circulation of “Third World” textual contestations of Euro-modernity from Africa (Msika 2016), the Caribbean (Nair 2016), and Latin America. Olakunle George (2003) refers to the aggregate of early twentieth century African intellection, which empowered and gave agency to the African world, as “African Letters.” The Europhone literary aspect of that tradition began in 1958, exactly 60 years ago, with the publishing of Things Fall Apart as a founding Anglophone text of Heinemann Publishers’ African Writers’ Series (Hill 1971). Translated Francophone texts such as Mongo Beti’ Mission to Karla (1964) and Ferdinand Oyono’s Houseboy (1966) later joined the oeuvre under the same series, which “was initially founded on Nigerian fiction” (Hill 20). Although Amos Tutuola’s The Palwine Drinkard (1952) and Cyprian Ekwensi’s People of the City (1954) preceded Achebe’s work, they— especially the former—were hardly instrumental to that literary worlding and agency that began properly with Things Fall Apart’s direct contestation of Euro-modernity (Achebe 1972, 7). For example, Faber and Faber’s assessment of Tutola’s linguistically “strange” and necromantic work (Low 2006: 15), which “provoked acute anxiety over how to manage [its] meaning” (21), was purely market-oriented. The publisher, Geoffrey Faber’s, prevailing concern was that the work should satisfy a Western exotic consumption of an “authentic” anthropological Africa (Lindfors 1975 in Low 22). In his view “publishing is a business and like all businesses must be made to pay” (Low 22). Faber and Faber’s hard-nosed pragmatism was in direct contradistinction to Heinemann’s admixture of market dynamics with vision, and a local cultural advocacy on behalf of a home-grown African literary corpus (Currey 2003: 576). This is in spite of any criticism of Heinemann’s nearmonopoly or the half-hearted and hurried ghettoization6 charge leveled against its series by Wole Soyinka. And history and context has proven Heinemann right. According to James Currey (2003): “When Soyinka was in prison in Nigeria, his wife agreed to let André Deutsch finally sub-lease the novel for the Series. Deutsch’s story was that she said she needed food for the family, while Wole Soyinka in prison was at least being fed” (585). By the 1980s when Heinemann’s African Writer’s Series died due to a continental economic downtown and the vicissitudes of transnational capital as dictated by the company’s new ownership, the series had created a permanent niche for African literature in the so-called Western Canon. That 120 AFROPOLITAN LITERATURE AS WORLD LITERATURE aura of consecration was inherited by Afropolitan writing—which is simply writing by that group of writers who have come to be identified as the “third generation” (Adesanmi 2005) of African writers. It seems that, after 60 years, it is Faber and Faber’s erstwhile commodifying market imperative rather than Heinemann’s admixture of vision and practical business, which has reestablished itself in the transnational literary establishment’s re-engagement with contemporary African literature. Due, amongst other reasons, to the same African economic lull (Griswold 2000) that led to the continental exit of Heineman international in the 1980s, there was a brief literary interregnum—a period of quiescence— when it appeared that African writing’s global circulation had been arrested. While some of those who would later join metropolitan Afropolitan and Afropean ranks remained on the continent, the economic depression of the 1980s led to a mass exodus of young Africans to the literary capitals of the West—usually the USA and UK for Anglophones and France or Belgium for Francophones—in search of publishing opportunities7 (Garuba 1987: xv). In a prescient ironic expression and referring to objects—artworks—Harry Garuba opines that what was once forcibly taken away was now willing going into exile (1). That historical unworlding applied as well to black bodies—once forcibly removed (during slavery) but now willingly boarding ships and planes for the Western hemisphere. In a similar fashion to the burgeoning of Caribbean literature in the 1950s due to the arrival of the Windrush Generation in London in 1948 (Brown 2016), a group of young Africans, who would later flow into a nascent metropolitan Afropolitan and Afropean pool, willingly arrived in Western Capitals in the 1980s into the late 1990s. This movement was very dissimilar to the coerced uprooting of their distant New World ancestors. It resulted in a renaissance of African literary production and an international publication unfettered by ideological concerns. In other words, the social condition of their presence in the metropolis as economic and literary exiles, not as slaves or the colonized, meant that they would naturally have a different relationship to roots compared to a romantic Black Atlantic. More importantly, these young generations full of levity lived, and still live, in a relatively humane condition and radically different socio-political dispensation beside the servitude and brutality of the “old” New World, the continued injustices of the later Black Atlantic after the First World War, the racialized interpellation of blackness in the colonial metropolis or the violent decolonial upheaval in Sub-Saharan African in the 1960s (Jameson 1987). There was therefore, and still is, an existential and historical disconnection which led to the new Afropolitans and Afropeans emphasising routes and discountenancing roots as joyously celebrated in Taiye Selasi’s “Bye-Bye Babar” (2005). Nascent Afropolitans and Afropeans were ushered into global “literary capitals” synonymous with enormous resources for literary illumination as HOW AFROPOLITANISM UNWORLDS THE AFRICAN WORLD 121 understood by Pascale Cassanova (2004). These metropolitan locales were already conversant with African literature as a corpus with an established literary worlding capacity based on the work and metropolitan consecration of first and second generation African writers. This is exemplified in the “hyper-canonization” (Hassan 2001: 298) of Chinua Achebe, Ngugi Wa Thiongo and others; the awarding of the 1986 Nobel Prize to Wole Soyinka, or Ben Okri’ winning of the Booker prize in 1991. This elaborate illumination pointed to a ready metropolitan market and audience, both synonymous with, and indistinguishable from, one another. The relationship of the new Afropolitan and Afropean as subject to their object—literature—is therefore necessarily mediated by the dynamics of the metropolitan book market itself as an institution. Although Richard Peterson (1985) identifies six limitations to literary production, “technology, law, industry structure, organizational structure, the market and occupational careers” (45), I want to submit that all these factors are largely subsumed under the “Institution” of the market and are symptoms and functions of it. This is much in the same way that the eighteenth century Romantic Artist’s relationship to its audience or literary patrons became mediated by the institution of the Market after the discovery of the printing press enabled mass production. And the contemporary African writer is more marketoriented than ever before. It is then instinctive that most Afropolitan and Afropean writers today would tailor their writing to suit the literary taste of the metropolitan market—prize-awarding bodies such as the Caine Prize for African Writing in London, established in 1999 towards harnessing the new metropolitan influx of talents, or the much older Prix Goncourt in Paris. This is apart from the British Commonwealth short story prize, the Commonwealth Writers Prize, and the Booker Prize. The market also includes, as a matter of course, metropolitan publishers, book reviewers, literary agents, readers, and other general literary administrative bodies and facilitators such as PEN International—“agents of legitimation” (Huggan 2001:5) of which Graham Huggan (2001) considers the writer himself or herself as one (5). These all constitute an amorphous market, which the Afropolitan or Afropean writer appeals to in his or her aesthetics—plot, story, and narrative strategies that aligns with the fetishized image of Africa redolent in the Western imaginary since the medieval period. The question of ethics, which engaged previous generations of African and Black writers going back to the 1700s thus becomes superfluous in the ideologically vacuous, market-ruled, individualistic, and impersonal metropolitan publishing Socious into which the new Afropolitan/Afropean writer is thrust. The literary worlding of the Afropolitan or Afropean novel is literally and literarily a twenty-first century phenomenon, beginning around the end of the twentieth century and being consolidated through international literary prizes by the year 2000 forwards. The London publication of the 122 AFROPOLITAN LITERATURE AS WORLD LITERATURE Nigerian Biyi Bandele-Thomas’ The Sympathetic Undertaker and Other dreams [1991], The Man Who Came in from the Back of the Beyond [1991] to literary acclaim and academic canonization in the UK, Canada and the USA alerted the metropolitan literary establishment to a resurgence of African literature. The British establishment responded to the promise of an African literary renaissance in the metropolis, especially after the long demise of the African Writers’ Series, by establishing the aforementioned Caine Prize in 1999.8 Doseline Wanjiru Kiguru’s 2016 PhD dissertation is a detailed and elaborate discussion of the role of international literary prizes in the worlding of contemporary African writing and therefore bears no repetition here. Suffice it to say that Western literary agents of legitimation have had a major role in the global circulation and canonization of Afropolitan and Afropean writing. Conclusion: What is a World? If Afropolitan writing is only world literature in literary rather than sociopolitical world-making terms, in what shape does such writing then leave the world it comes into contact with? Pheng Cheah’s 2016 critic of European time and its subordination of all other local temporalities to a Greenwich Mean Time exemplifies the constructedness of the globe, that is, of maps and their inscriptions and the ways of reading them. Moreover, the efficacy of aesthetic abolitionism in the Black Atlantic suggests that literature is a kind of social map, an inscription with political valence and social transformative power. However, most Afropolitan writings do not coincide with such a view of literature due to their refusal to have a much more socially relevant impact on the black and African world. New Afropolitan writing is in a supply-and-demand economic relationship with the Western literary establishment. It is rather more responsive to the vicissitudes of the global literary marketplace than to any world-making imperatives. To continue the cartographic analogy, Afropolitan literature like Black and African writing before it could be a kind of map for re-reading and making meaning of the objective world, for repositioning the self to that world that has been already constructed by older hermeneutical maps. As it is presently, Afropolitanism fails to reshape our old ways of seeing the African world and engaging or interacting with it. This lack of a symbolic worlding is a twenty-first century perpetuation of a millennial African crisis in which the continent seems to move forwards only to stand still, trapped in a socio-economic, political, and developmental morass. The Afropolitan and (similar) Afropean refusal to engage Africa on a cultural materialist level in terms of its colonial past and neocolonial present recalls Benita Parry’s materialist critique of theories which ignore the sociopolitical and economic realities of Africa for a formalist reading of text. HOW AFROPOLITANISM UNWORLDS THE AFRICAN WORLD 123 Afropean and Afropolitan writing seems to be performative of a creative equivalent of such formalist textual exegesis. Perhaps this serious hermeneutical omission has as its goal a projection of the continent into a utopic future. However, such impatient futurism will merely consolidate, rather than help surpass, the challenges of the past while enlarging and normalizing an equally problematic and neo-colonial present. Notes 1 For slavery timeline see: http://www.brycchancarey.com/slavery/chrono2.htm 2 See Cheng, K.C. et. al. SLC24A5 affects Pigmentation in Zebrafish and Humans (2005). This ground breaking DNA research by a group of Pennsylvania State University anthropological geneticists has effectively resolved the eternal argument about the biological validity of the sociological category of “race.” Keith Cheng and his group of twenty-four scientists have proven that whiteness is due to a gene mutation which occurred between 20,000 and 50,000 years ago as Homo Sapiens Sapien migrated northward and eastward away from Africa as the original home of the human species. This supports archaeological, ancient historical, and anthropological accounts of the negroid antecedents of man. 3 Some of the works produced by these freed African slaves are Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, humbly submitted to the inhabitants of Great-Britain by Ottobah Cugoano, a native of Africa (London: T. Becker, 1787); The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Oluadah Equiano written by Himself (London, 1789), Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho: An African, to which are Prefixed, Memoirs of his Life (London: John Nichols, 1782); Tractatus de arte sobrie et accurate philosophandi (Germany, 1729); and Disputation De jure Maurorum in Europa (Germany, 1739), both philosophical and legal writings by Amo. There is evidence of much earlier writing by Juan Latino (1516–1606). He published works in 1573, 1576 and 1585. See Jahnheinz Jahn (1968:30). 4 He was an emancipated slave of Nigerian stock and is not to be confused with the British lexicographer and writer of the same name often referred to as Dr. Johnson and who lived during the eighteenth century (1709–1784). 5 Simon Gikandi’s introduction to The Novel in Africa and the Caribbean since 1950, also edited by him, gives a detailed and elaborate analysis of the worlding of African literature; as such an overview is sufficient here. 6 Allan Hill reports that when Soyinka refused to have his novel, The Interpreters, re-issued in the Heinemann Series while in prison, his wife at the time quipped that the family needed to eat and that at least Soyinka was being fed in prison. 7 There is the unusual example of Moses Izegawa who moved to the Netherlands. However, his work, Abyssinian Chronicles, is not conceived in the Afropolitan spirit. 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How Afropolitanism Unworlds the African World Abstract This chapter establishes a continuity between the global consecration of foundational African literature and the framing and possibility of its derivative Afropolitan writing as world literature. Apart from literary history, I pay attention to the cosmopolitanism evoked in the idea of the Afropolitan, to complex identity formations, to commodity fetishism, to changing trends in Western academic criticism, as well as to material conditions of literary production and reception and the question of audience ( Adesokan 2012 , Julien 2006 ), in locating how Afropolitan writing becomes world literature. However, I also submit that contemporary Afropolitanism’s futuristic ( Gikandi 2011 ) “Post-Colonial,” as distinct from postcolonial, gaze (Shohat 1992, McClintock 1992 ) is problematic because it ideologically distances any Afropolitan body of work away from Africa’s global geopolitical, social and economic history (Parry 1999).

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