ABSTRACT
Chapter 4 traces the genealogy of the neologism “Afropea” (Afropeanism), as a practice of self-naming that challenges the constructed incommensurability or “unsayabilty” of Black and French, through Léonora Miano's Afropea: Utopie post-occidentale et post-raciste (2020) [Afropea: A Post-occidental and Post-Racist racist Utopia]. Reading Miano's novel Blues pour Elise [Blues for Elise] (2010) through Édouard Glissant's conception of rhizomic/relation identities it frames blackness in France as a relational (non-hyphenated) Afropean (Afroeuropean) identity that connects to an everyday negotiation of multiple sites of affiliation. Miano's use of music as a disembodied narrative voice as an Afropean “poetics of relationality” associated it with a transnational space through Alexander Weheliye's proposition that the production, circulation and consumption of black music creates a site for Afrodiasporic cultural affiliations. I therefore argue that the multivocal narration of the Afroparisian everyday, inflected by geographically diverse music of relational Afroeuropean space in Blues pour Elise, representing Paris as a cityscape that is musically permeated by the soundscapes of blackness.
