Abstract
Arguing that ‘the cultural history of the [African] continent can hardly be understood outside of the framework of itinerance, mobility and displacement’, the Cameroonian scholar and public intellectual Achille Mbembe has proposed the concept of Afropolitanism as an ethos, a ‘way of being in the world’ and also as an aesthetic, a poetics and a ‘politico-intellectual paradigm’ for the twenty-first century.1 Analogous, in some respects, to Kwame Anthony Appiah’s notion of a ‘rooted’ cosmopolitanism in its combination of a mobile worldliness and an attachment to place, Afropolitanism offers a specifically African iteration of cosmopolitanism.2 To date, the concept has been taken up primarily with reference to visual art and literature; I propose, however, that Afropolitanism may also fruitfully be debated in connection with an emergent body of travel narratives about Africa produced predominantly by Africans who reside on the continent.3 Travel narratives have long mediated forms of mobility and displacement, offering an ambivalent oscillation between a consolidation of the travelling consciousness or its dissolution, between the pleasures and the dangers to be derived from distant places and encounters with strangers. Africa has long served as a key site for such ambivalent journeying, more often conducted by outsiders to the continent and frequently by those who thought themselves to be travelling away from modernity, even as colonial modernity made that travel possible.4
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Notes
Achille Mbembe, ‘Afropolitanism’, trans. Laurent Chauvet, Africa Remix: Contemporary Art of a Continent, éd. Clive Kellner (Johannesburg: Jacana, 2007), 26–9.
Kwame Anthony Appiah, ‘Cosmopolitan Patriots’, Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation, ed. Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 91–114.
Arjun Appadurai has analysed this phenomenon in other global contexts in The Fear of Small Numbers (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005)
Wole Soyinka takes it up in Of Africa (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012).
This exhibit also originated at the Studio Museum in Harlem and included artists ranging from El Anatsui and Ablade Glover to Rosemary Karaga. See the exhibition catalogue by Grace Stanislaus, Contemporary African Artists: Challenging Tradition (New York: Studio Museum in Harlem, 1990).
See Neil Lazarus, The Postcolonial Unconscious (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 5
Basil Davidson, The Black Man’s Burden: Africa and the Curse of the Nation-State (New York: Times, 1992)
See Zygmunt Bauman, Globalization: The Human Consequences (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998)
Pádraig Carmody, The New Scramble for Africa (Cambridge: Polity, 2011)
David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005)
John Saul, Millennial Africa: Capitalism, Socialism, Democracy (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2001).
Achille Mbembe, ‘Ways of Seeing: Beyond the New Nativism’ African Studies Review 44.2 (2001): 1–14
See Paul Tiyambe Zeleza, ‘What Happened to the African Renaissance? The Challenges of Development in the Twenty-First Century’, Comparatives Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 29.2 (2009): 155–70.
See Paul Tiyambe Zeleza, ‘Diaspora Dialogues: Engagements between Africa and its Diasporas’, The New African Diaspora, eds. Isidore Okpewho and Nikiru Nzegwu (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), 31–58.
Ham Mukasa, Uganda’s Katikiro in London, ed. Simon Gikandi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998)
Nnamdi Azikiwe, My Odyssey: An Autobiography (London: Hurst, 1970)
Bernard Dadié, Un Nègre à Paris (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1959)
Ivan Vladislavič, Portrait with Keys: The City of Johannesburg Unlocked (New York and London: Norton, 2006), 15.
See Peter Hulme, ‘Deep Maps: Travelling on the Spot’, Travel Writing, Form and Empire, eds. Paul Smethurst and Julia Kuehn (London: Routledge, 2009), 132–47.
Achille Mbembe and Sarah Nuttall (eds.), Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008).
Binyavanga Wainaina, One Day I Will Write about this Place (Minneapolis: Graywolf, 2011), 155.
Noo Saro-Wiwa, Looking for Transwonderland: Travels in Nigeria (Berkeley: Soft Skull, 2012).
Stuart Hall, ‘Political Belonging in a World of Multiple Identities’, Conceiving Cosmopolitanism: Theory, Context, and Practice, eds. Steven Vertovec and Robin Cohen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 25–31
Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, Theory from the South, or, How Euro-America is Evolving Toward Africa (Boulder, CO and London: Paradigm, 2012).
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© 2015 Maureen Moynagh
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Moynagh, M. (2015). Afropolitan Travels: ‘Discovering Home’ and the World in Africa. In: Kuehn, J., Smethurst, P. (eds) New Directions in Travel Writing Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137457257_18
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137457257_18
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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