Seminar: Afropolitan Writers [SS-2026]

Anglophone African literature has experienced a remarkable boom over the last 15 years, with authors such as Teju Cole, Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie, Taiye Selasi, and NoViolet Bulawayo representing a new and highly successful generation of African writers writing in English. The term “Afropolitans” refers to the mostly well-educated, professionally successful characters featured in many of their writings, whose career paths and family histories often spread across various continents, very much like the authors’ biographies. 

“Afropolitanism,” a term made prominent by Taiye Selasi in 2005, seeks to counteract what she perceives as a somewhat blighted vision of Africa that obscures the vibrancy and productivity of its artists, writers, and intellectuals. It is difficult not to connect a discussion of Afropolitan writing to Paul Gilroy’s notion of “the Black Atlantic.” In his eponymous study from 1993, Gilroy looks at the Atlantic world as a site of cultural production defined by movements of circulation, where routes, ever since the colonial slave trade, have mattered more than roots. For this reason alone, the Black Atlantic remains a rather relevant framework for a discussion of these 21^st-century authors. Novels such as Adichie’s Americanah (2013), NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names (2013), Teju Cole’s Open City (2011), and Taiye Selasi’s Ghana Must Go (2013) provide compelling accounts of an African diaspora, a with Europe and the US being distant sites of projection, oftentimes taking the shape of refracted images and idealizations.

The impact of digital media, the globalized dimension of African writing that these authors confidently display, as well as distinct performative and material practices depicted in these novels call for a re-assessment of Gilroy’s concept. In We Need New Names, for example, the performative streak borders on the ludic. The child narrator depicts a global geography enacted by her and her little friends, playing what is termed a “Country-Game,” where each child picks a country they would like to ‘be.’ This represents a playful take on the complications arising in these novels (How to live up to role models that come from tradition but are increasingly also media products? How to thrive as a black artist producing ‘global’ art?). As we will see in the seminar, these performances often follow (or deviate from) authoritative narratives to cope with the confusion that characters experience caused by their very Afropolitanism, namely the fact that they can easily get, as Selasi herself put it, “lost in transnation.”