Objectively, the global moment of Afropolitanism affords a greater visibility to people of African descent, be it in the world of visual arts, media, literature, or business. 39 Yet parallel to what commentators have described as a positive rendering of what is usually a negative ‘African exceptionalism,’ Afro-pessimist thinkers like Wilderson have contended that the “ruse of analogy erroneously locates the Black in the world – a place where s/he has not been since the dawning of Blackness” (2010: 50). While especially the irreducible antagonism at the heart of Afro-pessimist arguments nullifies Afropolitanism as an attempt to locate a Black positionality in the world, particularly as an analogous appropriation of a humanist concept such as cosmopolitanism, Making Black History argues that the Afropolitan moment is ambiguously constituted by optimism and pessimism, hope and anxiety, and that much of its negative affect is already apparent in the uneasy negotiations of Afropolitanism as a label. As scholar Chielozona → Eze has noted, the fusing of African and cosmopolitan suggests that the African cannot “just be cosmopolitan” (2014: 240). A reading of Ghana Must Go and other novels as profoundly anxious expressions of transnationalism suggests the same: Why is it so hard to live in the world as an African? Are Africans not of this world?
I want to argue that this uneasy ‘worlding’ indeed helps situate the moment of Afropolitanism apropos contemporary notions of critical race theory. For Afro-pessimist thinkers, the world is defined by anti-Blackness in such a way that allows only one conclusion: the end of the world. As Wilderson asserts in an interview: “We’re trying to destroy the world” (2014: 20). Yet how does this worlding or unworlding occur in the Afropolitan novel? Rather than unequivocally asserting global social belonging, Afropolitanism has always conveyed more ambiguity than certainty, echoing concerns that are not entirely unlike Afro-pessimist concerns. However, rather than rendering Blackness an ontological position overdetermined by the social death of the slave, these novels investigate Blackness as a mutually imbricating history. Stretching and probing the global Black imaginary, they also interrogate the historicity of anti-Blackness, bringing together Hegel’s eclipsing of African agency, the social death of the slave, as well as the neocolonial and anti-Black carceral state.
William David Hart, in a survey of the most important trajectories of critical race studies from W.E.B. Du Bois to Hortense Spillers, distinguishes broadly between two modes of theorizing anti-Black racism. One is a strictly materialist conceptualizing that renders racism either an effect or an enabler of capitalism. The other trajectory understands Blackness (also) as an ontological position of Western metaphysics. For the latter thinkers, Afro-pessimists chiefly among them, the “ideological needs of capitalism do not explain the perdurance of antiblack racism, its virtually limitless scope, its metastatic reproduction, and the depths of its pathological animosity” (Hart 2018: 14). By highlighting not only the historicity of race and Blackness but also its actual equation with or mutual imbrication with the idea of history and temporality, the novels under discussion strike a particular balance. Relying neither primarily on transhistorical metaphysics nor on historical materialism, they reveal how the fictions of race and racism, of whiteness and Blackness, are indeed constituted by both. Similar to the way that, for many, capitalism seems inextricably bound up with very idea of national time and global history, allowing for a ‘no alternative’ mode of imagining, so are our common narratives of capital H history and national progress deeply invested in the endless reproduction of race and racism.40 Yet by making ‘Black’ history rather than ontology, they highlight how temporality and historicism carry a heightened significance for the Black Diaspora as a whole, but also, ultimately, how they express the hope that the shackles of the current world ordering can be broken and, along with anti-Blackness, may actually recede into history. Unequivocally, if to varying degrees, these novels do not simply project into the future but also attend to the particularly urgent manner in which race in/as history manifests itself in the contemporary context of the US. In addressing and reflecting this urgency, they signal the very solidarity they are accused of lacking – even
though this solidarity takes a different guise than the assumed sameness of old.
The following readings are predominantly invested in how these novels negate or negotiate ethico-political belonging – to various worlds, yet particularly the Black Diaspora – through their often-metafictional play and engagement with temporality and historicity. As such, they are investigations into these novels’ intradiasporic world making. “In its multispatial and multitemporal dimensions,” Ngũgĩ writes, “the novel literally can bring all spaces and times within itself” (2016: 8). But how do these novels speak to, dismiss, or actualize Black Diaspora legacies, presents, and futures? These questions need to be carefully parsed, since all three novels employ these elements to varying degrees and effects. As Cole’s Open City probes both the generic confinements and the limitations of a (diasporic) solidarity grounded in the recognition of trauma – or, rather, the limited empathic transference engendered by an aesthetic sublimation of trauma – diasporic histories appear almost hopelessly gripped by the kind of historicism that conditions a melancholic response as much as it bars an actual engagement with the present. The gleam of hope merely anticipated in Open City is hyperbolically realized in Adichie’s Americanah, as genre-induced, libidinal attachments to a rosy, perhaps even race-less, future wrest its protagonists from the overdetermining reach of history and back to the mother country. Gyasi’s Homegoing, on the other hand, employs both the forward push of futurity and the backward pull of historicity as a novel that flashes the hopeful potential of restoration and connection across the rupture of the Middle Passage, without trivializing the long-lasting effects of slavery and its aftermath.
These subtle renderings of diasporic temporalities accrue specific meaning if one acknowledges that Afropolitanism emerges in a moment when both the promise of a post-racial US-America and that of Black diasporic unity are called into question. Against this discursive background, I argue that Blackness – like time – is not only investigated, probed, stretched, and made malleable by these novels. It is also employed, purposefully, as a form of truce and as earnest endeavor signaling diasporic desire, hope for unity, and imagined collectivity.
At the same time, it is fair to say that the extraordinary critical acclaim and commercial success of these novels was at least partly fueled by an iteration of the “New Negro” paradigm. Authors and works were, sometimes, peddled as spokespersons for a version of Blackness that has not only surpassed, but even bypassed the disgraceful history of slavery. Their contested position within the cultural landscape, as well as an acute awareness thereof, is reflected in Teju Cole’s laconic statement: “I’m an Afropolitan, a pan-African, an Afro-pessimist, depending on who hates me on any given day” (Bady 2015: para. 36). Surely, these authors were conscious
of how their success could be mobilized and pitted against African Americans and often went to great lengths to assert that they were “happily black” (Adichie), “black on all sides” (Cole), or that slavery “affects us still” (Gyasi).41
Should we read their perspectives on slavery, their investigation of US race relations, and their employment of race in/as history as an act of duty? That would be too easy and most likely unconvincing. Could it, then, be an act of love? While they are marked by a diasporic desire that indeed strives toward “a more perfect union,” infusing the space of diaspora with a renewed, multilateral sense of kinship, this is not an entirely selfless act. They are expanding Blackness in order to insert their positionality, amplifying their voices and their perspectives. Their giving shape to the sign of Africa in the moment of Afropolitanism is also a conscious inscribing, not only into the US, or the world, but into the time and space of diaspora as the world. Particularly within the political and cultural context of the US, however, it is a precarious balancing act to do both: to challenge but not to undermine. My readings attempt to trace this balancing act, and to show how these novels are carefully constructed narratives that, in one way or another, help us acknowledge that there can never be a single narrative on anything – and certainly not on Blackness. Rather than supplanting or making Blackness disappear, these texts purposefully probe and navigate race in/as history. By actively (re-)inscribing Africa into the diasporic imaginary, they alter and make Black history.