ABSTRACT
Afropolitanism has evolved over the past 10 years as a rubric for describing transnational African identity. This piece develops a cultural-materialist analysis of that phenomenon as a metropolitan instrument of self-affirmation, in the first instance. I argue that the phenomenon of Afropolitanism is to some extent a subjective and cultivated condition, and has become a cultural instrument of black political agency in the Metropolis. However, the resultant self-affirmation accrues only to the Afropolitan cultural producer, who acquires symbolic capital towards that goal. A larger black migrant population and diaspora, which does not possess symbolic capital and therefore lacks this same social and class mobility, is still marginalized. This creates a division between the culture of Afropolitanism and the politics it aims to engender. I conclude that a dialectical interaction between culture and politics is necessary and important in order for the condition of Afropolitanism to jettison its elitist tendency and to enable rich theoretical, and more progressive, ideological gains.
