ABSTRACT
Critiques of Afropolitanism that dismiss the concept because of its links to consumerism and commodification assume an unchallenging compliance of those considered as Afropolitans with dominant ideologies of consumption and the rule of capital. Considering Taiye Selasi’s article ‘Bye-Bye Babar’, this seems plausible, but it is also a reductive interpretation that effaces the transformative potential of Afropolitanism. The literary works and online presence in public discourses of writers labelled Afropolitan show that they challenge and revise the present world order in the way that Walter Mignolo and other theorists of decoloniality envisage in their concept of ‘critical cosmopolitanism’. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Teju Cole, for example, implement Afropolitanism as a critical assessment of global culture that defies a reduction of the concept simply to its commercial dimension. In their own ways, Adichie and Cole explore the affordances and the limitations of the internet, mobility and globalization.
