Making black history (CHAPTER 1)

Chapter I Introduction – Writing Race in the Moment of Afropolitanism
‎
‎”We all know the truth: more connects us than separates us. But in times of crisis the wise build bridges, while the foolish build barriers. We must find a way to look after one another, as if we were one single tribe.”
‎
‎T’Challa
‎
‎”Whatever of good may have come in these years of change, the shadow of a deep disappointment rests upon the Negro people.”
‎
‎W.EB. Du Bois
‎
‎”I have always felt like I want to change the course of history.”
‎
‎Opal Tometi
‎
‎1 Imagining Diaspora under the Sign of Africa
‎
‎Afropolitanism, that much is certain, is a quintessentially 21st-century phenomenon. The term itself was popularized by Taiye Selasi in 2005 in “Bye-Bye Babar (or What is an Afropolitan),” an essay for the British magazine The LIP. While Selasi’s coinage most prevalently served as a new identificatory label for an African-descendant bourgeoisie in Western metropolises, described as “the newest generation of African emigrants, coming soon or collected already at a law firm/chem lab/jazz lounge near you” (2013: 528), the concept also featured slightly earlier in the writings of Achille Mbembe, drawing attention to the fluidity, mobility, and cultural hybridity already proper to the African continent. As Justus K. S. Makokha and Jennifer Wawrzinek, the editors of the first academic publication on Afropolitanism, put it, both Selasi and Mbembe “describe a novel critical term, at whose core are questions of borders and spaces of new African identities” and which denotes “Africans at home and abroad who subscribe to anti-nativist and cosmopolitan interpretations of African identities” (2011: 17-18).1 In its wider reception, Afropolitanism has sparked a myriad of debates, with reactions ranging from affirmative praise to critical skepticism, e. g. in Binyavanga Wainaina’s 2012 speech “I am a Pan-Africanist, not an Afropolitan” or in Simon Gikandi’s endorsing of the concept, framing it as a “new phenomenology of Africanness” and a “way of being African in the
‎
‎
‎world” (2011a: 9). While there is a plethora of publications trying to discern the normative value of Afropolitanism as an identificatory concept, label, politics, ethics, or aesthetics, the working definition of Afropolitanism adopted in this book comes closest to the one formulated by Ryan Thomas -Skinner in “Why Afropolitanism Matters” (2017). Skinner also wishes to retain the idea of Afropolitanism as a “polysemous and […] ‘floating signifier” that is less defined as a “good idea as it is […] ‘good to think with” (3). Indeed, in order to neither fix nor blur the polysemy or multidirectedness of Afropolitanism, and in ways elaborated in the following, this book conceives of Afropolitanism first and foremost as a historical and cultural moment. More precisely, I investigate a selection of Afropolitan novels, which could mean literature written by authors deemed to be Afropolitan or featuring Afropolitan characters but is here defined as literature written and received in the moment of Afropolitanism, that is, a certain historical constellation that allows us to glimpse the shifting and multiple silhouettes which Africa, as signifier, as real and imagined locus, embodies in the globalized, yet predominantly Western, cultural landscape of the 21st century. How does one capture a moment? In “Bye-Bye Babar” Selasi historicizes Afropolitanism through an often-quoted narrative, referencing the increased African emigration to the Global North since the mid-20th century: “It isn’t hard to trace our genealogy. Starting in the 1960s, the young, gifted and broke left Africa in pursuit of higher education and happiness abroad” (2013a: 528). In the context of the United States, it is indeed the 1965 Hart-Celler Immigration Act that is most often cited as inaugurating the emergence of a “New African Diaspora,” epitomized by Sam Robert’s statement in the New York Times that “[f] or the first time, more blacks are coming to the United States from Africa than during the slave trade” (2005: section 1.1.).4 Yet Selasi also offers another time frame, one marked by matters of cultural representation. Somewhere “between the 1988 release of Coming to America and the 2001 crowning of a Nigerian Miss World,” she writes, “the general image of young Africans in the West transmorphed from goofy to gorgeous” (2013a: 529).
‎
‎For the purpose of my argument, I would like to trace Selasi’s timeline into the more recent past. Three years after Selasi published her essay, the Studio Museum in Harlem produced the show “Flow” that showcased young diasporic African artists. In 2011, the Houston Museum of African American Culture hosted a symposium with the title “Africans in America – The New Beat of Afropolitans,” the same year in which the Victoria & Albert Museum in London organized the evening event “Friday Late: Afropolitans.” In the following years, the global literary marketplace was flushed with narratives by young diasporic authors like Selasi herself, who were praised for their cosmopolitan, transnational outlook and for their post-melting pot
‎

‎sensibilities and were deliberately marketed under the slogan Afropolitanism. So far, this reads as a fairly impressionistic yet straightforward succession and success story for Selasi’s young, hip, and artistically gifted Afropolitans. Yet I would extend this timeline by adding a few related snapshots: In 2013, Beyoncé sampled another one of these authors, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, further cementing Adichie’s pop-cultural fame. Three years later, 2016, Kendrick Lamar closed a spectacular Grammy performance by showing a silhouette of Africa inscribed with the word “Compton.” And in 2018, Ryan Coogler’s Marvel franchise Black Panther became one of the most successful movies of all time. In this timeline, Selasi’s historization of the Afropolitan moment comes full circle, as the emergence of Afropolitanism is bracketed with two Hollywood representations: from Coming to America’s garishly stereotypical, traditionalist kingdom of Zamunda to the equally monarchist yet Afro-futuristic kingdom of Wakanda.
‎
‎By adding these elements, the narrative changes in two important ways.
‎
‎For one, it is no longer about individuals labeled as Afropolitans but frames Afropolitanism as a larger diasporic discourse or mode of signification.
‎
‎Conceived by Selasi as the result of complex historico-political trajectories made visible through cultural representations, it marks how, in a global yet US-dominated cultural imaginary, the African signifier has evolved into a hypervisible and highly valuable symbolic currency: from goofy to glamorous, backward to vanguard. Secondly, this narrative relays how the contemporary diasporic imaginary goes beyond issues of identification and othering but is instead marked by various degrees of projection, rejection, citation, sampling, and collaboration. Contrary to claims that Afropolitanism is first and foremost a renunciation of Black diasporic unity or solidarity and “instead seeks to reimagine an Africa apart from Blackness,” I argue that, particularly in the US, it marks a moment of intense re-signification of Blackness and diasporic solidarity (-Balakrishnan 2018: 576).
‎
‎While Teju Cole in “On the Blackness of the Panther,” a thought-provoking meditation on Hollywood fantasies, Bandung-solidarity, and African complexity, has criticized how films like Black Panther rely on the image of Africa “as trope and trap, backdrop and background” (2018: para. 15), he can be credited with fashioning a similarly effective trope himself: Africa not only in, but as index of the entire world. In “At Home in Brooklyn,” an article for an exhibition catalogue featuring the works of Wangechi Mutu and others, Cole describes these artists as various instances of “what happens when Africa meets Brooklyn” (2014a: 30). Pondering his NYC borough, a place characterized by the author’s intimate sense of belonging, Cole frames his experience of feeling at home in the world with a reflection on the famous 1972 photograph taken by the
‎
‎Copyrighted material
‎Apollo 17 space shuttle, showing, for the first time, our “blue marble.” He writes:
‎
‎Just one continent is visible from the angle at which that photograph was taken. It was as though the earth presented itself with an indexical representation of all it contained. The planet puts its best face forward for its first formal portrait, and one continent happens to be visible in its entirety: Africa. (Cole 2014a: para. 12)
‎
‎Like many other protagonists of the Afropolitan moment, Cole is actively inscribing Africa into a Black diasporic imaginary by claiming an (at least) two-tier type of belonging, in his case to a traditionally Black neighborhood like Brooklyn and the continent of Africa. At the same time, he identifies the substantial “energy flows” between the physically mismatched pair of Africa and Brooklyn as an indexical “picture of the world right now” (ibid.). If anything, Black Panther signals a similar will to (re)imagine the contemporary diaspora – or global humanity for that matter – unfolding in and across differences and under the sign of Africa. As King T’Challa’s voiceover during the film’s final scenes implores: “We all know the truth: more connects us than separates us. But in times of crisis the wise build bridges, while the foolish build barriers. We must find a way to look after one another, as if we were one single tribe.”
‎
‎The rubric of Afropolitan literature is as flexible as it is expansive, ranging from generational definitions to questions of genre, setting, or subject matter. Among the Anglophone novels and short story collections that usually make these ever extending lists are Taiye Selasi’s Ghana Must Go (2013), NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names (2013), Chris Abani’s The Virgin of Flames (2007), Chinelo Okparanta’s Happiness, Like Water (2013), Dinaw – Mengestu’s The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears (2007), Sefi →Atta’s A Bit of Difference (2013), Chika Unigwe’s On Black Sisters’ Street (2007), and Brian Chikwava’s Harare North (2009). For this study, a selection of three major Afropolitan novels has been made – major in that each of them has become an international bestseller – which, to my mind, best capture what is both popular with and popularized by these literatures. Teju Cole’s Open City (2011), Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah (2013), and Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing (2016) are all deliberate investigations of the US, exploring the questions of Blackness and diaspora from, at minimum, bifocal and, as I will argue, pronouncedly metahistorical perspectives. Incidentally, these authors also represent the full spectrum of contemporary African/US-American relations, at least in respect to citizenship and positionality. Teju Cole, who was born in the US in 1975 yet grew up in Nigeria and returned to the US as a teenager, holds both citizenships and has referred to this duality as being “not 100 percent at home in either of them” (2017: para. 7). Chimamanda
‎
‎
‎Ngozi Adichie was born in Nigeria in 1977 and moved to the US for university education. She is Nigerian, staunchly and outspokenly so, but has permanent resident status in the US, traveling back and forth. Yaa Gyasi was born in Ghana (1989) but raised in the US from the age of two, thoroughly undergoing what is commonly understood as the ‘immigrant experience.’
‎
‎Afropolitan literatures pose different sets of questions, some transnational, some intra-continental, some intradiasporic, and the following study is most interested in the latter. Rather than distinguishing merely between “Western-facing” and continental-facing literatures, as some commentators have, it is useful to differentiate further and acknowledge that the Afropolitan moment is also characterized by an Americanization of African fiction. An important and, due to this study’s focus, overlooked role in this development is, of course, played by international publishing industries, which also mirrors the shift from Europe to North America. For example, the renowned Heinemann African Writers Series (later Penguin African Writer’s Series) began in 1962 and was finally discontinued in 2003 after dwindling sales and diminished relevance over the prior two decades (its last publication was Ike Oguine’s A Squatter’s Tale, incidentally a novel about a Nigerian immigrant in the US). Yet all of the authors discussed here, and many others of their moment, have been picked up and promoted by US-American publishing houses. Regardless of the fact that African literatures have always had a bifurcated publishing history (with Heinemann based not only in London, but also Ibadan and Nairobi), the debate about the major role of Western publishing houses is usually flanked by references to a vibrant, if commercially limited, publishing scene on the continent, e. g. Chimurenga or Kwani Trust (which was also ‘exposed’ for being ‘Western-funded’). More recent publishing companies like Cassava Republic, hailed as “the first African publisher to open a subsidiary outside the continent,” complicate matters further by straddling multiple markets with impressive aplomb (-Fick 2016: para 5).5
‎
‎The US-American backdrop of the novels discussed here already adds a particularly defining and indeed ‘new’ spin to the émigré, exilic, or immigrant African novel of prior generations, which usually detailed African sojourns in Europe. While the protagonists in Buchi Emecheta’s In the Ditch (1972) or Ama Ata-Aidoo’s Our Sister Killjoy (1977) would often encounter members of diasporic communities – hailing from other parts of Africa or the Caribbean,
‎
‎thus illustrating the fact that the Black Diaspora is made up of multiple diasporas – a US context shifts the framing of these different diasporic trajectories from the geographical to the temporal, rendering the contemporary diasporic imaginary primarily a conversation between the old and the new. Consequently, within the Afropolitan moment it is also possible to speak of an Africanization of (African) American fiction. In this sense, Afropolitan literature describes what Stephanie Li, in an American Literary
‎

‎History issue on contemporary African American writing, describes as one of its most salient features: “the impact of a generation of African-born or -identified authors like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Teju Cole, and Mfoniso Udofia, who all bring a contemporary diasporic perspective to US race relations” (2017: 632). Of course, the impact of this conversation is not limited to the diaspora, not only because “the shape of diaspora is the shape of the globe” (Wright 2013: 15). By rebranding and simultaneously complicating the “lazy but necessary signifier” that is Africa (Hall 2003: 32), Afropolitan negotiations of Blackness embody yet another instance of Stuart Hall’s notion of Black popular culture as a globally effective “site of strategic contestation” (Hall 1993: 108). Yet, as the following discussion will show, it is in the context of the US that shifting significations of Blackness develop the strongest ripple effect and the moment of Afropolitanism manifests as a particularly crucial historical constellation. While the Afropolitan moment can surely be characterized as a symbolic and representational shift that has bestowed these hugely successful literatures with cultural currency, I conceive of it as mode or moment in which the shifting role of Africa in the global imaginary is part of an ongoing diasporic conversation determining the sometimes uneasy negotiations of race, nationality, and Black identity between the so-called old and new diaspora. In this, I follow Yogita Goyal’s assertion that “now the new diaspora writes back,” as well as her call that we need new diasporas, meaning we need new concepts and understandings of how Africa and its global dispersion may signify in the 21st century (Goyal 2017c: 659).
‎
‎1.1 The Moment of Blackness and the Discourse of Postness
‎
‎As these works are predominantly set, produced, and received in a US context, the supposed “newness” of the perspectives of a “Non-American Black” (Adichie 2013) or “Newly Black” (Chude-Sokei 2014) generation of artists needs to be questioned, contrasted, and related to more established diasporic epistemologies. Afropolitan writing, engaged in US-American racial discourses and championing a Black subjectivity that forgoes the formative trauma of slavery, thus runs the risk of being mobilized in opposition to African American subjectivity or as stand-in or proof of a post-racial paradigm. Thus, one of my key concerns is to find a nuanced and productive way to illuminate the notion of (historical) change symbolized and addressed by these novels while remaining wary of the rhetoric of postness, newness, turns or paradigm shifts. The Afropolitan moment, as a lens or tool that is “good to think with,” allows me to reflect on history and temporality in a manner that traces the various entry points, origins, futures, and trajectories but also limits of Blackness in the contemporary diasporic imaginary. As these texts foreground different epistemic positionalities toward the Black
‎

‎Diaspora and its generic conventions through their respective treatment of temporality, historiography, and the transnational imaginary, I intend to frame them as articulations of a particular moment without neglecting that these novels are in continuous conversation with earlier or other traditions and epistemologies.
‎
‎The aspect of newness that is often ascribed to the Afropolitan as another variant of postness, introduces another important framework for this study and one that is equally dependent on the notion of Afropolitanism as a moment. Why should one want to capture a moment if not to signal or indicate change? And who, in the course of this young century, has embodied the notion of change and the historical constellation of the Afropolitan better than Barack Obama, the American son of a Kenyan immigrant? As scholar Paul Tiyambe Zeleza asserted, Obama’s “multiple racial, religious, cultural, spatial, and social identities and affiliations make him the quintessential subject and sign, signifier and signified of a 21st century transnational African consciousness and solidarity” (2011: 37). Zeleza, who has elsewhere developed a system of “flows” when writing about the linkages between Africa and its diasporas (2019), identified the “age of Obama” as one of potentiality, a chance to regroup and refocus Pan-Africanism by seriously engaging the “overlapping diasporas in the US” and examining how they relate to their respective homelands and Africa as a whole (2011: 37). More or less independent from the fact that Obama would never implement a radical politics “committed to profound social change” (2011: 34), Zeleza predicted that the symbolic value of Obama’s presidency, his impact on a Pan-African or larger diasporic imaginary would remain profound. As the son of a Kenyan immigrant and symbol “of black citizenship and African globality, who projects a new image of the African arrival and presence in America,” Zeleza notes, “Obama reconnects the old diaspora to Africa and vice-versa in more immediate, intimate, and innovative ways” (2011: 38). Generally, Obama’s presidency had a particularly galvanizing effect not only in (Black) American contexts, but throughout the diaspora and the African continent, symbolizing euphoric hope as well as intense disappointment.
‎
‎In Seeing Through Race (2012), W.J.T. Mitchell develops the notion of the ‘teachable moment’ apropos Barack Obama’s attempt to contain the controversy around the arrest of Professor Henry Louis Gates in 2009. Mitchell uses the pedagogical notion of the teachable moment and his interpretation of race as a medium to see through rather than look at, in order to pose “the more general notion of race as a global issue in ourtime -our ‘moment’ as it were” (2012: 2). In this, he is particularly wary of the rhetoric of postness, which he describes as “temporal substitutes for a positive historical description that has not yet found its proper name” (45). At the same time, he notes that our contemporary moment is marked by a
‎

‎”post-racial consensus” (60) that has allowed many white Americans to ignore these issues – at least until, through violent spectacles of police violence, “anti-Black racism becomes visible” (54).
‎
‎Arguably, 2020 provided a tragic abundance of such spectacles. In particular, the brutal killing of George Floyd seems to have engendered a level of awareness that – if not in quality, then perhaps in quantity – seems to have broadly refuted the prevailing “post-racial consensus” that Mitchell identifies. Yet, if anything, the enhanced visibility of racist violence and its political responses, such as the US Movement for Black Lives, have highlighted the tenacity of post-racial claims amidst a pandemic that -contrary to the levelling effect of an ostensibly universal threat – has disproportionally affected African American communities (-Jean-Baptiste and Green 2020). The pervasiveness of post-racial thinking should not be surprising – given the complex ways in which race and racism structure contemporary societies. Even where it is not deliberately harnessed in favor of white supremacy, post-racialism acts as a cognitive shorthand, blanketing these often thorny complexities in lieu of lofty egalitarian or universalist ideals.
‎
‎In a similar vein, the tendency to resolve and dissolve racial difference in claims of universality is also proper to Afropolitanism, which, as a concept, has always been embedded in theories of cosmopolitanism. This semantic kinship has triggered negative responses by critics who see in it not only a premature invocation of post-racialism but also warn against the uncritical appropriation of Enlightenment concepts relying on Eurocentric notions of exclusion. An outspoken critic of Afropolitanism, scholar Cheryl Sterling argues that the necessity to push back biological race concepts does not “eradicate racism or the history of racialism” that undergirds a concept like cosmopolitanism (2015: 121). In the wake of an increasingly globalized and demographically intertwined 21st century, she notes, “the continued sublation of the Black subject” persists, thus calling for a persistent reminding of the world that Black lives matter (ibid.).7
‎
‎Notably, in terms of racial politics, the years of Obama’s presidency – and their aftermath – have become more emblematic of stagnation or backlash than transcendence or advancement. Rather than prematurely signaling progress, then, one could still consider the ‘moment of Obama’ as ushering in a renewed and intensified discussion on race and racism, a ‘teachable moment’ one could say, that markedly affected Afropolitanism. Because Afropolitanism gains the most symbolic currency within this historical period, it is perhaps also unsurprising that its discourses mirror the affective economies triggered by Obama’s presidency. The novels under discussion were all published post-2008, precisely because the Afropolitan moment dovetails with and derives substantial momentum from the so-called post-racial moment, allegedly sealed by the advent of US America’s first Black

president. Equally premature, I argue, are initial interpretations of Afropolitan writers and fictions as being beyond race or about divesting Africanity from Blackness. The tensions arising from the conundrum of post-Black African cosmopolitanism is reflected in the literature, as well as in its criticism.
‎
‎In 2011, in the wake of much enthusiasm around Afropolitanism, -. Gikandi hailed this “new phenomenology of Africanness” as a way to “embrace and celebrate a state of cultural hybridity to be of Africa and of other worlds at the same time (2011a: 9). Five years later, Gikandi’s assessment of literary Afropolitanism struck a notably minor key. In an interview with the authors of In Search of the Afropolitan, he observes that “this elite group of Afro-cosmopolitans has adopted Afropolitanism, not as a celebration of living a global life, but as anxiety” (2016: 49). Interpreting this affective change as a response to what he calls “the incomplete project of transnationalism, or of globalization,” Gikandi notes his surprise at the persistency of identifications and the fraught need for cultural affiliations in these literatures (ibid. 51). For him, the most interesting question is why “these identifications do not disappear and coalesce into a certain cosmopolitan prose?” (ibid. 50). Works by Teju Cole, Sefi Atta, and particularly Tayie Selasi’s Ghana Must Go, the first novel that was prominently marketed under the notion of Afropolitanism, express for Gikandi less of the term’s confident global belonging but indeed “a constant failure to live in that world” (ibid. 49). Likewise, and particularly for the US-American contexts that these novels fictionalize, Louis Chude-Sokei detects “a sense of loss, of transformation and decline” in the literary texts of these newly Black American authors (2014: 53). Ascribing this to the complicated intradiasporic relationship, the unanswered questions and uneasy negotiations of racial solidarity and diasporic unity, he concludes: “These palpitating moments of discontinuity and Pan-African brokenness draw attention to the great width and depth of difference, of arguably different diasporas that assume the intimacy of a shared name but which can no longer assume a shared experience, much less shared politics” (55).
‎
‎Adopting a similar, yet ultimately less bleak view, I would contend that the questions of race and Blackness are still too vexing to “coalesce” into cosmopolitanism. However, I agree that complicated intradiasporic conversations on these matters do play out in these texts, and that these often uneasy conversations defy the comforting notions of hybridity or Pan-African unity of prior decades. In particular, Afropolitanism challenges received notions of Blackness in the US. While the idea of post-racialism has been at least identified as a dangerous myth, Afropolitanism often hypostatizes in a post-Black discourse signaling a reconfiguration and regrouping of US-American Blackness rather than its overcoming. In many ways, the notion of post-Blackness in public discourse similarly retains and
‎

‎reconfigures its subject matter – like the other discourses on postness constituting Afropolitanism, e. g. the postcolonial or postmodern. Rather than disappearing, then, established modes of Black signification, both within the US and in the global context of the Black Diaspora, have mutated and differentiated in a way that cannot be captured by the temporal category of posterity, at least not if one understands Blackness as a complex intersection of identities that cannot be neatly mapped onto a necessarily limited, national narrative of linear progress but is much better grasped though the elasticity of a moment. Indeed, elaborating on his definition of a moment as a more productive tool to preserve and see through, rather than censor, the issue at hand, Mitchell writes: “Ranging between the expansiveness of an epoch, a period, or an era, and the singular, decisive character of an event, the moment is arguably the most elastic term in the lexicons of time and history” (2012: 2). It is precisely this temporal elasticity that lends itself so well to the project at hand. In order to illuminate the complex negotiations of Blackness and the African signifier in the Afropolitan novel, a temporal metaphor seems most apt to encompass both historical and experiential configurations of Blackness without erasing and substituting one for the other or re-installing hierarchies that privilege narratives of authenticity.
‎
‎In order to trace this development more closely, it is worthwhile to return to the “foundational” text of Afropolitanism, Taiye Selasi’s “Bye-Bye Babar (or What is an Afropolitan).” Critics who consider the rejection of Blackness one of Afropolitanism’s most salient features, often refer to the following passage from Selasi’s essay:
‎
‎[T]he way we see our race – whether black or biracial or none of the above – is a question of politics, rather than pigment; not all of us claim to be black. Often this relates to the way we were raised, whether proximate to other brown people (e. g. black Americans) or removed. Finally, how we conceive of race will accord with where we locate ourselves in the history that produced “blackness” and the political processes that continue to shape it. (2013a: 530)
‎
‎For those inclined to perceive Afropolitanism as a “willingness to break from received racial molds,” this paragraph indicates “the need to reconfigure African identity outside of Blackness” – as if that were a prerequisite for the true “worlding” of the African subject (Balakrishnan 2018: 577). Indeed, the crucial sentiments behind Selasi’s otherwise rather matter-of-fact definition of Blackness as a social, historical, and political construct seem to be the notions of agency and choice. She posits “the way we see our race” (emphasis added), defying the heteronomy of racialization, and also “not all of us claim to be black,” meaning not all of us choose to be Black. Underlying
‎
‎the question of choice is the possibility of rejection, the “I prefer not to” and “I’d rather not” that suggest the disavowal of racism and the negation of solidarity and add to the perceived snobbery and slight that many associate with Afropolitanism. However, while the observation that for many members of the new diaspora racial solidarity or Black identification is not given but negotiated surely holds true, Selasi’s utterances must also be understood as part of a cultural and political discourse in which the notion of what constitutes ‘authentic’ Blackness is unstable, even, or especially, for African Americans. Rather than taking the willed divestment of Blackness as an Afropolitan a priori, I would argue that Selasi’s hyperbolic and polemic text from 2005 signals not only the ‘will’ and ‘need’ of its performative agency, but also a profound insecurity and apprehension around the category of Blackness. More than a decade later, it becomes clear that this ambiguity is proper to the Afropolitan moment, particularly to how it pans out in the United States.
‎
‎In 2001, Harlem Studio museum director Thelma Golden defined “Post-Black” as “characterized by artists who were adamant about not being labeled ‘black’ artists, though their work was steeped, in fact deeply interested, in redefining complex notions of blackness” (2001: 14). The post-racial declarations of the Obama era were primed by this discourse of post-Blackness. As a figure, Obama crystallized several different yet related trajectories, all coalescing around the 21st-century version of Du Bois’s inquiry into “the strange meaning of being black here in the dawning of the Twentieth Century” (Souls 3). Not only the demographic fact of overlapping diasporas, but also debates around post-Soul aesthetics or post-Civil Rights-politics were bundled by the symbol of Obama, creating highly charged nodes of interpretations. 10 The debates around Obama’s racial identity were particularly indicative of these shifts, illuminating the overarching discourse of post-Blackness. In the most controversial piece, Debra Dickerson’s “Colorblind,” the author put it bluntly:
‎
‎Obama isn’t black. “Black,” in our political and social reality, means those descended from West African slaves. Voluntary immigrants of African descent (even those descended from West Indian slaves) are just that, voluntary immigrants of African descent with markedly different outlooks on the role of race in their lives and in politics. At a minimum, it can’t be assumed that a Nigerian cabdriver and a third-generation Harlemite have more in common than the fact a cop won’t bother to make the distinction. They’re both “black” as a matter of skin color and DNA, but only the Harlemite, for better or worse, is politically and culturally black, as we use the term. (2007: para. 10)
‎
‎
‎Already the immediate reactions to this, however, conveyed the true complexity of this issue, namely that the debate was very much imbedded in a general reevaluation and questioning of the American category of “Blackness.” As a Poplicks blogger named O.W. writes:
‎
‎I hear what she’s saying here but does that mean that a third-generation Harlemite shares the same perspectives as every other African American (of slave-descent) in every other part of the country? Does the Blackness experienced or internalized by said Harlemite equal that of a Black person from Baldwin Hills? Or Chicago’s Southside? Or Hunter’s Point? The point here is that you can’t have it both ways: either Blackness is a fixed identity (a philosophy that plays all too well into racist hands) or it’s broad enough to include a range of Blackness beyond just the authenticating force of slavery’s legacy. (2007: para. 7)
‎
‎Hence, without even having to take up the issue of his Kenyan heritage or his biracial background, journalist Touré was able to state: “Post-Black means we are like Obama: rooted in but not restricted by Blackness” (2011: 12). Notably, the optimism signaled by the earlier instances of Post-Blackness soon made way for more critical assessments of that discourse’s cultural and political merits. And this, in turn, also affected Afropolitan literatures. In his glum analysis of how the protagonists of novels like Ike Oguine’s A Squatter’s Tale, Teju Cole’s Open City, or Adichie’s Americanah intersect, or rather fail to intersect with Black American culture, Chude-Sokei argues that the aforementioned “sense of loss, of transformation and decline” is in fact “paradigmatic, not only of contemporary African writing and the waves of immigration that impel it, but for the wider context of the new cultural politics of a black America that is deeply in the throes of what theorist Judith Butler would call a ‘category crisis'” (2014: 53-54).
‎
‎It is possible to interpret the novels selected for my analysis as various responses to the 21st-century failures epitomized by the US – which was seen as a driving force of an incomplete project of globalization – and particularly those shortcomings associated with the figure of Obama: the extension of the color line into the foreseeable future and the incessant demotion of Africa’s role in global and diasporic relations. For those who ever believed in it, Obama’s notion of change, his vision of a “more perfect union,” has fallen flat in the light of a violent and seemingly unchanging status quo. To many ears, then, Du Bois’s description of post-Emancipation America in The Souls of Black Folk, that “[w]hatever of good may have come in these years of change, the shadow of a deep disappointment rests upon the Negro people,” sounds strangely familiar (2007: 10). The disappointments born from that hopeful moment, its impact on how the US, the Black Diaspora, or the world narrates its notions of political progress, often translates into pronouncedly pessimist
‎
‎
‎metahistorical positions that equally play out in the Afropolitan novel -already impacted by the pessimist outlook of post-independence African literatures. Seen from the more austere of these perspectives, the notion of progressive historical change has been fatally undermined, if not inverted, as the contemporary political moment is characterized not by progress, but by a sense of endless repetition and constant return, marked by what Aliyyah –Abdur-Rahman describes as the “perpetuity of crisis” (2017: 687) and haunted by what Saidiya Hartman has coined the “afterlife of slavery” (2007: 6).
‎
‎Yet, as Vinson Cunningham writes in The New Yorker, “Obama’s truest political gift, perhaps, was the ability to let a thousand flowers of expectation, born of history, bloom” (para. 5).11 The same moment that allowed Obama to signify and thwart the prefigured fulfillment of a promise marking the final success of Black liberation, its telos and icon – also made way for Black Lives Matter, “the most significant political uprising since the Civil Rights era” (Li 2017: 633). As a digital movement, Black Lives Matter has effortlessly transcended borders; morphing from an online hashtag to galvanizing grassroots activism around the globe. The anti-racist protests occurring around the globe in the summer of 2020 were driven in large and significant parts by the concerted efforts of various local Black Lives Matter groups, many of which had formed amidst the wave of global demonstrations following the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner in 2014, and who had since worked often independently but determinedly for racial justice.
‎
‎In an article titled “The Changing Same,” referencing the term coined by Amiri Baraka, George Lipsitz places the recent decade, along with its premature promise of a post-racial society, on an anti-progressive, static timeline that he calls the “Katrina-Ferguson-Conjuncture”:
‎
‎A decade that began with the organized abandonment and yet punitive confinement of impoverished Black residents of New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 culminated with the manipulation of the Grand Jury process to make sure that no charges would be brought against the killer of Michael Brown in Ferguson in 2014. Along the way, a racially orchestrated economic crisis produced the greatest loss of assets in history for Black and brown people. Vehement rhetoric, violent acts, and vile policies have targeted immigrants of color, producing mass deportations and detentions. […] In popular culture and political discourse, online and in the streets, in private acts of discrimination and in public policies […] racism continues to be learned, legitimated and legislated. (2018: 16-17)
‎
‎
‎While Lipsitz accedes that the Katrina-Ferguson-Conjuncture is also an oppositional conjuncture, carrying the seed for change, he identifies the present as a time of uncanny returns: “Words uttered decades ago could just as easily have been spoken yesterday. The #BlackLives Matter and #SayHer Name movements of today are new, but their core concerns eerily echo James Baldwin’s observations from 1963” (ibid. 16). Critical voices like Lipsitz often describe the political present as a reiteration of the Civil Rights movement to highlight the continuity of racism that underlies what Joseph R. Winters has called the “agony of progress.” Yet there are crucial differences that may also affect the way one thinks about notions of historical change, repetition, and continuity. While it is not a secret, it is often overlooked that one of the three female founders of Black Lives Matter, Opal Tometi, is a Nigerian-American who understands anti-Black racism as a global problem and has made immigration a core issue of BLM’s political work. 12 Conscious of how her experiences intersect with those of African Americans, she has repeatedly emphasized how “black immigrant experience in the U.S. must be understood not in contrast to the African American experience but as an integral part of it” (Noel 2016: para. 24). Surely, Black Lives Matter is already a feminist intervention into a narrative told and retold by the kind of singular men that Hazel Carby identifies as race men – men like Du Bois, Obama, or even the fictional T’Challa, who reiterate what Wright terms the “heteropatriarchal” stakes in Black counterdiscourses – but it is also an Africanist intervention, a repetition with a difference. 13
‎
‎All of the authors discussed in this book have, in one way or another, reflected on the ways in which their Blackness intersects with American notions of Blackness, as well as their Africanness. For example, in “On the Blackness of the Panther,” Cole describes how, after moving to the US, he was often forced to abandon his ethnic or national modes of narrating the self in favor of a subsuming, and eternally ‘othered,’ Africanness (2018: para. 10-12). Cole names three stages of becoming: the first notion of being ‘African’ interpellated him as a strange “other,” followed by a Pan-African sensibility engendered by inhabiting “mutual spaces with Africans” who had equally been placed in this category and who shared the “still fresh” experience of colonialism: “African, whatever else it was, was about collectively undoing this assault.” Concomitant with this awakened political consciousness was the journey of becoming Black, which, however, proved “more complex”:
‎
‎”Black” was something else. It was in a sense more inclusive. […] [I]t took in all that colonial hangover and added to it the American experiences of slavery, slave rebellion, Jim Crow, and contemporary racism, as well as the connective tissue that bound the Black Atlantic into a single territory
‎
‎
‎of pain – which brought all of the Caribbean into its orbit as well as European, Latin American, and global diasporic blackness.
‎
‎Yet the connective properties of the vast and multifaceted spatio-temporal network of the Black Diaspora could also be undermined by narrow conceptions of the category ‘black.’ Cole continues:
‎
‎But “black” was also more restrictive because, in everyday language, “black” (or “Black”) was American black, and “American black” meant slave-descended American black. […] To be black in America, that localized tenor of “black” had to be learned, it had to be learned and loved. […] We learned black and loved black – knowing all the while, though, that it wasn’t the only black.
‎
‎Generally, the negative assessment of both the cultural context and the affective range of Afropolitan literatures holds only partially true, as especially more recent artworks by these newly Black Americans offer complex and self-confident explorations of the category of Blackness. Apprehending American racial formations through the moment of Afropolitanism, it becomes apparent that the scope of Blackness has expanded and continues to expand and that many artists, rather than signaling intradiasporic breaks and rifts, have grappled with this “category crisis” in an ultimately reconciliatory manner.
‎
‎In an article on Yaa Gyasi and the artist Toyin Ojih Odutola from 2017, Selasi observes a very similar process. Here, she revisits precisely her statements on race and Blackness from “Bye-Bye Babar.” She writes:
‎
‎In 2005 I wrote an essay describing an Afropolitan experience: the decidedly transcultural upbringing of many Africans at home and abroad. How such Afropolitans negotiate that second divide – not between black and white, but between black and African – often depends on where they are raised, whether among or apart from African-Americans. Gyasi and Ojih Odutola typify the distinction. (2017: para. 5)
‎
‎In this text, Selasi sets out to investigate not only these artists’ shared West-African backgrounds, but particularly their Southern upbringing in Alabama, depicting Blackness as an intersection of multiple lines of identification. Selasi asserts how both artists offer particularly astute observations on race in America:
‎
‎This, perhaps, is the answer to my second query: how two young African artists came to articulate America’s racial complexities so beautifully.
‎
‎
‎Gyasi and Ojih Odutola consider themselves black but have not always. In order to feel at home in that identity they’ve had to study, understand, expand it. Finally, their work insists that we “just look” – and expand our vision too. (para. 15)
‎
‎What Selasi is saying here thoroughly undermines the notion of Afropolitanism being primarily about a divestment of Blackness or a transcending of race in favor of a global and/or neoliberal African identity. Rather, we begin to understand how this moment is also marked by complex and ever-changing significations of racial identity. Afropolitanism, thus contextualized, is not overdetermined by a rejection, but rather by an investigation and negotiation of Blackness. The complex ambiguities of Afropolitan novels articulate this distinction quite elegantly. Even a novel like Ghana Must Go that undoubtedly de-emphasizes the importance or race and foregrounds the dimension of class cannot ignore how racial formations structure social reality but rather interrogates an authenticating understanding of Blackness. Ghana Must Go, along with Selasi’s essay from 2005, signals an important element and a stage of Afropolitanism that is important to investigate yet should not statically fix the temporal transience and dynamism of this moment. As Selasi concedes in her article on Odutola and Gyasi, not only have these two African-born artists bridged the “representational chasm” in which this immigrant group was largely absent from popular culture, but they have sublimated the attaining “story of unbelonging, an account not of double consciousness but triple” into becoming “two of the finest observers of race in America” (Selasi 2017: para. 1-3). I argue that all Afropolitan novels discussed in Making Black History can be understood as performing this kind of labor: studying, understanding, and expanding Blackness in order to “feel at home in that identity.”14 Considering how heavily overdetermined these issues are, this is certainly not an easy or comfortable conversation to have – a balancing act that clearly shows in these carefully constructed novels, which appear highly aware of how the texts and authors have circulated and signified in public discourse. What follows is a brief overview over two distinct yet closely connected discourses impacting Afropolitan literatures.
‎