Abstract:

This article evaluates the concept of Afropolitanism, introduced by Taiye Selasi and Achille Mbembe, as a radical break from the political genealogy of Black nationalism. Whereas racialist traditions, such as Pan-Africanism and Négritude, had presupposed a close emancipatory connection between global racial solidarity and a politics of African reclamation, Afropolitanism refers to a cosmopolitan ethos of transcending national and racial differences. It envisages Africa as a conceptual geography of evolving relationships, shaped by migration and multiracialism. This chapter argues that, in refiguring the idea of Africa outside of racially autochthonous terms, Afropolitanism undermines the political elision of Blackness and Africa, and thereby, both racial solidarity and a politics of belonging. The implication is foremost a challenge to the concept of the African diaspora itself, especially regarding ancestors of those dispersed by slavery. The development of Afropolitanism in the mid-2000s occurred due to the need to manufacture an ethos for Africa’s multiracial postcolonies and 21st century migrations. This chapter concludes by arguing that Afropolitanism cannot act as an ethic for the age of global cosmopolitanism until it reckons with the problem of the inverse relationship: that is, the question of diaspora.

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