ABSTRACT
Afropolitan is not a politics, but it dresses in the commodified residue of political struggle, Fela Kuti’s style stripped of its revolutionary substance. The Afropolitan declines to be Afro-pessimistic, because she has the privilege of declaring victory from the dance floor in London, the art exhibition in Rome, or the runway in New York. Critics–and the term has so many critics–will say that the Afropolitan is all empty style, a crass and shallow effort to make African identity into a fashion accessory, skin-deep at best, exoticizing at worst. If Fanonians expect to find revolutionary subjectivity in Africa, they will not find it in Taiye Selasi, but one cannot help but observe that such an obligation is rarely placed on the backs of White middle-class writers. The backlash against the Afropolitan reveals a nostalgia for a time when African culture-work was thought to be, a revolutionary act, when simply to exist, and to speak, was to resist imperial hegemony.
