ABSTRACT
Afropolitanism can be seen as the one of the latest manifestations of such a planetary commerce in blackness. It seems as though, having consumed so much of black American culture, there is now a demand for more authentic, more virgin, black cultures to be consumed. In this chapter, author suggests that Afropolitanism is the handmaiden of the 'Africa Rising' narrative and he/she suspect its championing by the Western media runs the risk of leading us ever further astray from the 'disreputable, angry places', noted by Gilroy, 'where the political interests of racialised minorities might be identified and worked upon without being encumbered by an affected liberal innocence'. When the author first wrote the 'Why I am not an Afropolitan' piece, he/she argued that Afropolitanism's enduring insights: vacating the seduction of pernicious racialized thinking, the recognition of African identities as fluid, and the notion that the African past is characterized by mixing, blending, and superimposing, were seemingly increasingly sidelined.
