ABSTRACT

This volume evaluates the vitality of the term ‘Afropolitan’ within the fields of African and Afro-diasporic studies. A hotly debated and malleable term, its wide circulation has allowed for Afropolitanism to become a contested space for critical inquiry. The contributions to this book are representative of the lively discussions that Afropolitan aesthetics, identity politics and Afro(cosmo)politanisms have sparked in recent years. The book aims to continue the debates around these concepts foregrounded by earlier works in the fields of postcolonial literature, African cultural studies, and studies of diaspora and transnationalism. This book was originally published as a special issue of the European Journal of English Studies.

chapter |8 pages

Introduction

Debating the Afropolitan

chapter 1|14 pages

An Afropolitan literary aesthetics?

Afropolitan style and tropes in recent diasporic African fiction

chapter 2|15 pages

Afropolitan in their own way?

Writing and self-identification in Aminatta Forna and Chika Unigwe

chapter 3|15 pages

Lost in translation

Re-reading the contemporary Afrodiasporic condition in Taiye Selasi’s Ghana Must Go

chapter 4|15 pages

Negotiating singularity and alikeness

Esi Edugyan, Lawrence Hill and Canadian Afrodiasporic writing

chapter 5|15 pages

Transforming the body, transculturing the city

Nalo Hopkinson’s fantastic Afropolitans

chapter 6|17 pages

Cosmopolitanism’s new clothes?

The limits of the concept of Afropolitanism