In Search of the Afropolitan

Encounters, Conversations and Contemporary Diasporic African Literature

Eva Rask Knudsen, Ulla Rahbek

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9798881872250
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: African Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In Search of the Afropolitan explores human encounters and moments that speak to the challenges of being a 21st century African of the world. Against the background of an engaging evaluation of the heated debate on Afropolitanism and what constitutes an Afropolitan, the authors turn to literature and its intrinsic capacity for unfolding the human figure of the African as inherently complex and multidimensional. Through a detailed probing of the Afropolitan in literary narratives, the book enters into conversations about self-understanding and the signification of Africa in the contexts of global mobility.

The book conceives of Afropolitanism as a flexible space of inquiry that curbs the inclination to set the definition of the 'ism' in stone. Instead, it attempts to distil, through close-up character analyses, a multifarious sense of what it means to be Afropolitan in the contemporary moment. In that sense, the encounters we come across in the literary narratives produce unexpected ontological negotiations on what it means to be African in the world today. As a special feature of In Search of the Afropolitan,the authors' conversations with prominent writers, thinkers, and critics provide a lively context for the ongoing debate on Afropolitanism and the Afropolitan.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Opening
• 1 Afropolitanism—A ContestedField and Its Trajectories
• 2 The Authors in Conversation with Simon Gikandi
• 3 The Vexed Question of Mobility
• 4 Here, There, and Elsewhere
• 5 ‘Africans of the World’ and the Politics of (Re-)Connection
• 6 The Authors in Conversation with Kwame Anthony Appiah, Minna Salami, Emma Dabiri, and Asta Busingye Lydersen
• 7 The Authors in Conversation with Sefi Atta, Chika Unigwe, and Brian Chikwava
• 8 Sharing and Caring
• 9 A Complex Weave
• 10 Less-Fortunate Afropolitans, ‘Lapsed Africans,’ and Class Conundrums
• A Statement by Taiye Selasi
• End Notes
• References
• Index