Afropolitan Literature as World Literature

James Hodapp, James Hodapp

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781501342592
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literaturkritik für Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft

African literature has never been more visible than it is today. Whereas Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, and Ngugi wa Thiong'o defined a golden generation of African writers in the 20th century, a new generation of "Afropolitan" writers including Chimamanda Adichie, Teju Cole, Taiye Selasi, and NoViolet Bulawayo have taken the world by storm by snatching up prestigious awards and selling millions of copies of their works. But what is the new, increasingly fashionable and marketable, Afropolitan vision of Africa's place in the world that they offer? How does it differ from that of previous generations? Why do some dissent? Afropolitanism refuses to reinforce images of Africa in world media as merely poor, war-torn, diseased, and constantly falling into chaos. By complicating the image of Africa as a hapless victim, Afropolitanism focuses on the wide-ranging influence Africa has on the world. However, some have characterized this kind of writing as light, populist fare that panders to Western audiences. Afropolitan Literature as World Literature examines the controversy surrounding Afropolitan literature in light of the unprecedented circulation of culture made possible by globalization, and ultimately argues for expanding its geographic and temporal boundaries.

1

Introduction

Africa and the Rest

James Hodapp

‘It seems that Nigerian writers who make it are from the diaspora. I want to write a book, but I’m scared. Will I be able to publish it? People don’t seem to want to read books by Nigerians living in Nigeria. Do I have to travel abroad for people to like my work?’ … She cited Kaine Agary’s Yellow-Yellow as a book similar to [Chimamanda] Adichie’s but didn’t enjoy the same publicity. ‘If Agary had published the book in the US, Nigerians would have taken an interest in it.’

NOOR SARO-WIWA, Looking for Transwonderland (90)

Afropolitanism then, seems to reference a particular kind of affluent mobility in the global north, as opposed to all global mobility.

GRACE MUSILA Part-Time Africans, Europolitans and Africa-Lite (111)

In Noor Saro-Wiwa’s travelogue, Looking for Transwonderland, she interviews a fledgling Nigerian writer at the University of Ibadan named Faith who wants to write stories “for the people,” i.e. Africans, but is convinced that the global publishing industry is structured in opposition to her. While she would like to write about Nigerians for Nigerian readers with a domestic publisher, she believes that the experiences of authors such as Kaine Agary, published in Nigeria by Dtalkshop with limited circulation, demonstrate that an African writer’s work must paradoxically originate outside of Africa to gain traction inside it. She acknowledges that publishing internationally with US or UK publishers would increase global circulations, but is frustrated that to become renowned in Africa a writer must produce for the outside world—a burden Euro-American writers do not face. Beyond the cruel irony of needing to publish outside of Africa to be legitimized inside of it, a pernicious classism imbues this publishing model because authors who choose the foreign publishing route must also have access to elite global networks to participate, or risk being characterized as a “local author” like Agary. Faith realizes that she might be able to publish in Africa, to limited effect, and that she does not have the inroads to the elite circles needed to “make it.” To Faith, the system is rigged: pre-determined to favor those already operating in international circles of influence at the expense of average Africans like her. Like many of us, she yearns for an African literary meritocracy in which the quality of one’s work determines success. For authors like Faith on the continent it can seem at times that the worldliness of contemporary African literature does not offer the expansiveness that we imagine it should. Worldliness appears to confine rather than liberate for the Faiths of Africa.

Faith’s localized anxiety in Nigeria is confirmed on a broader scale by Grace Musila, a prominent African critical theorist. Musila provides an unflattering overview of the machinations of the most prominent kind of worldly African writing: Afropolitan literature. The elitism inherent in this system concerns Musila. For her, the “affluent mobility” of well-educated elites who vacillate between various locales around the world, being “multi-local” as the proto-Afropolitan Taiye Selasi puts it, narrowly dictates who gains global recognition as African writers (Selasi, 2015). Such authors and their works, she argues, focus on “embracing enough of Africa to retain a certain flavour that sets it apart—presumably from Euro-American—but not so much as to be too ‘African’” (Musila, 2015: 110). Afropolitan literature in this guise is an African-flavored literature that offers Western readers a taste of Africa without alienating them too much by being “too African.” She terms this literature “Africa-Lite,” insinuating that Western readers would rather not get weighed down with African particularities when reading their African literature. This “lite-ness” means that a text can travel more easily because it “does not fully recognize difference,” meaning Afropolitan literature does not risk alienating Western readers. Offering an even sharper critique Brian Bwesigye, a Ugandan author and critic, has argued that Afropolitan literature is most interested in “proving the African-ness of London-minded elites,” confining it to a boutique status in which people who are insecure about proving their African bona fides successfully market African authenticity in easily accessible literature to validate themselves and their elite globetrotting lifestyles (Bwesigye, 2013).

Given the biting critiques of Afropolitan literature above, readers may wonder what value it has, and perhaps why one would begin a collection of essays on it with attempts to essentially delegitimize it. I begin with these critiques because they are salient. Afropolitanism is a controversial ideology and Afropolitan literature is polarizing. They are contested, they are resisted, and they are even dismissed. They are not safe, settled, or stable. One is just as likely to be on the end of intense interest as to receive eye rolls and sighs when speaking about Afropolitanism to academics, even those same critics who have contributed to the popularity of Afropolitan literature. This is to say that we are trying to figure out what exactly it is and what are the limits of its usefulness. I will touch on this later in this introduction, but the contributors’ articles are what actually put Afropolitanism to the test. And it needs to be tested because if indeed it is “lite” or “elite” or narrow then we don’t need it. If, on the other hand, we understand that it has been narrowly deployed but is not inherently so then we have a whole other charge: reimagine Afropolitanism as truly worldly. In other words, when Musila laments that Afropolitan literature does not reference “all global mobility” by Africans, I take that to mean that we should get to work on establishing different networks of mobility. If such global mobility is worth considering, and everyone seems to think it is, then critiquing Afropolitanism without thinking about how to amend it, supplement it, and make it better is in a nutshell a twenty-first century Afro-pessimism. Afropolitan Literature as World Literature acknowledges these critiques but pushes back against abandoning Afropolitanism, advocating for the notion that we can actually think about African literature that takes the globe as a unit without falling into the traps Afropolitan critiques lay out as its defining characteristics.

Saro-Wiwa and Musila highlight in their own ways the questions that many writers and scholars have about how Afropolitan literature engages the larger world. How representative of Africa is Afropolitan literature? Who are the power brokers? Who and what gets published? What is the role of African readerships? How much power do the tastes of Euro-American readers have? The timing of these questions is not arbitrary as we are experiencing an unprecedented wave of African writing that moves beyond the “writing back” of previous generations who sought to redress colonialism and its aftermath. We no longer live in a moment where we must rationalize the existence of African nations to prove to former colonial masters that Africa has culture. Instead, we have been vaulted into a time where we question the ability of largely inherited national boundaries to contain African subjectivity. Whether we think about subjectivities smaller than the nations that contain them, those that slip between national boundaries on the continent, or those that retain Africa but move beyond the continent, what it means to be African has outstripped the nation. To be African is to be global, and Afropolitanism represents that. Literature has been the realm par excellance that has represented this shift and the literature that embodies the elasticity of African subjectivity today—with all of the advantages and problems inherent in such a maneuver—is Afropolitan.

There are many ways to track and define Afropolitanism and Afropolitan literature, but perhaps the best way to begin to contextualize its relevance today is to acknowledge what scholars commonly contend preceded it, namely Afro-pessimism. For Simon Gikandi, Afropolitanism and Afropolitan literature “overcome the malady of Afro-pessimism—the belief that the continent and its populace is hopelessly imprisoned in its past, trapped in a vicious cycle of underdevelopment and held hostage to corrupt institutions” (Gikandi, 2011: 9). Afropolitanism and its literature has not focused on struggles against racism or fitting in abroad, but rather on normalizing the worldliness of Africans to demonstrate that being African and being worldly is entirely natural. Noted Cameroonian political theorist Achille Mbembe also finds value in Afropolitanism as “a way of being in the world, refusing on principle any form of victim identity” (29), stressing that moving beyond a particular place in Africa opens up new ways of being, new opportunities, and new worlds. In other words, being an African of the world is liberating as has been pointed out by Afropolitanism’s other primary architect Ghanaian-American novelist Taiye Selasi. Selasi’s literary output has also been commonly associated with Afropolitanism as has that of Chimamanda Adichie and Teju Cole, through a whole host of other authors such as NoViolet Bulawayo, Imbolo Mbue, and Dinaw Mengestu associated with the term. The literature of these authors represents Africans as worldly and no more at odds with the world than anyone else. It has quickly become the most widely read literature from the continent, and has increasingly constituted what we mean when we say African literature.

However, as noted above, the rise of Afropolitanism as an African world literature, has been derided in some African critical circles as being a fad, elitist, too commercial, not political enough, and (perhaps most damningly) too Western oriented. The major works of Afropolitanism such as Adichie’s Americanah, Cole’s Open City, and Selasi’s Ghana Must Go are novels set mainly in the US about well-educated Africans and their ability to move in and out of Africa and the US as they please. The characters are not without their struggles, but being African outside of Africa is not an existential conundrum for them. For many critics of Afropolitanism (and world literature), this too easy global Africanness elides the struggles Africans continue to experience in the West as well as overlooks the lived realities of the majority of Africans living in Africa who cannot simply move freely around the world. Despite gestures to the emancipatory nature of Afropolitanism, many critics, such as Emma Dabiri, Binyavanga Wainaina, and Marta Tveit, to name just a few of many, contend that Afropolitan literature only represents a narrow subset of Africans for Western audiences with the resources, i.e., Western publishers, to popularize certain works.

Critics also point to the absence of a clear political agenda as largely missing in the ideology and literature of Afropolitanism. Unlike previous generations who focused on anti-colonialism, independence, post-independence disillusionment, poor state governance, civil unrest, neo-colonialism, and a host of other issues facing Africa, Afropolitanism seems to lack a political angle. The fact that Afropolitanism does not adhere to a strict ideological line concerning what ails Africa should not be understood though as non-political. Helon Habila points this out when he writes that those who “accuse this generation of writers of not being ‘ideological’ enough, fail to see that this lack of ideology could be intentional and useful, an ideology in itself” (Habila, 2011). Rather than backing a certain political bent, or what Wole Soyinka has disparagingly called “ideological prisms and tidy formations of social development” Afropolitanism’s refusal to play into the hands of those who would have them take sides with regimes, movements, leaders, and other explicitly political entities that have largely failed the continent, is actually political (Soyinka, 2014: x). It is the politics of refusal, in that what is refused are the limitations of nations (and nationalisms), regimes, and promises of liberation that never materialize. It refuses victimhood by rejecting political saviors who never arrive while also refusing a new brand of Afropessimism. This is not to say that Afropolitans do not have sympathy with decolonial movements such as #mustfall, but that they understand the way movements rise, fall, and are coopted in the longue durée. Ironically, Afropolitanism is criticized for being a short-lived fad while its literature refuses attachments to contemporary trends, searching instead for Soyinka-esque universalism for African literature.

To these ends, Afropolitanism moves beyond the nation and the continent in terms of geography and ideology for liberation. Afropolitanism as a politics of refusal defines itself as what it is not as much as what it is. It is worldly; it is not centered on national, ethnic, or religious questions. Afropolitanism’s ideology-eschewing ideology is pivotal in understanding the term’s usefulness because its positivism, which can appear as naïve in light of the monumental challenges for Africa and Africans, is in fact a strategy of representation bent on escaping a defensive position for the continent. That is, rather than positioned to refute or account for the manner in which Africa is maligned, Afropolitanism seeks to assert the influence, power and worldliness of African subjectivity because it is precisely these elements that it has been deprived of in the discourses of colonialism and globalization. Its positivist, expansive, and seemingly boundless enthusiasm for celebrating all that is African while seemingly abjuring grounded political topics such as elections, corruption, neocolonialism, mineral extraction, and the like are in fact targeted political maneuvers. They do not deny the existence of Africa’s well-known ills, but stress the elements of African subjectivity that have been underrepresented.

In thinking about Afropolitan literature in this worldly and expansive sense though we are not met with only negation but rather with the semi-parallel field of World Literature writ large which seeks to address how particular literatures function on a global scale. Although we cannot engage in depth all of the established and nascent theories and methodologies here, we can begin to see how Afropolitan literature presents unique challenges to World Literature systems. The most prominent of these systems is David Damrosch’s by now commonplace archetype of world literature that articulates a process in which works that originally become important in their home geographies, are translated and circulate beyond their geographic origins. In this model, an internal program brings great works of a country, region, or people to the foreground almost demanding wider circulation once prominent domestic status has been achieved. For example, the best Chinese poetry of the early modern period that may have been central to Chinese literature for centuries would eventually be translated as some of the country’s best literature. Then, the rest of the world would take notice and get a glimpse, mediated by translation, of Chinese poetry. Clearly though such a model of circulation does not characterize the dilemma of authors like Faith. Her work must be foreign born, enter modes of circulation in place, be already in a European language (mainly English or French), and appeal to a global audience before it can appeal to an African one. Like Afropolitanism, Damrosch’s system of World Literature is also not without its elite tendencies, such as who becomes prominent in a particular culture and how decisions on translation are made in accordance with foreign markets. The system cannot simply be trusted to be organic and what emerges as World Literature may or may not r...