ABSTRACT
Afropolitanism is a term that has risen over and over again in recent popular and critical discourse despite efforts by many African writers and cultural critics to lay it to rest. Achille Mbembe popularized this term in academic discourse with his 2005 essay 'Afropolitanism', published in February 2005 in English in Africa Remix and in French in Africultures magazine at the end of the same year. In this essay, Mbembe defines Afropolitanism as 'an aesthetic and particular poetic of the world' that is founded, in part, on an awareness of 'the presence of the elsewhere in the here and vice versa'. Drawing attention to Yambo Ouologuem's Devoir de Violence and Sony Labou Tansi's L'Autre Monde, Mbembe suggests that this new aesthetic moves beyond 'the fetishization of origins' and the relationship between the self and the Other or the self and the world to the more significant problems of 'self-explication' and the 'after-life'.
