Afropolitanism

This Shared Space of Africanness”: The Hair Salon as Afropolitan Heterotopia

7 Comments / MAKING BLACK HISTORY /

Americanah is a diasporic novel that explicitly negotiates different Black epistemologies. While acceding to the constitutive force of an afterlife of slavery, the novel also investigates other moments of race in/as history, and it proffers other forms of Blackness: communal, diverse, Pan-African. At times, we can detect a strained but nevertheless existent notion of a […]

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‎”True from Experience”: Reception and the Realness of Racialization

9 Comments / MAKING BLACK HISTORY /

‎Writing about the 19th-century realist novel in The Bourgeois, Franco Moretti argues that “description as a form was not neutral at all: its effect was to inscribe the present so deeply in the past that alternatives became simply unimaginable” (93). One could argue that Americanah employs realism in an effort to document the facticity and

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Conclusion: The Challenges of Afropolitan World Making

1 Comment / MAKING BLACK HISTORY /

Objectively, the global moment of Afropolitanism affords a greater visibility to people of African descent, be it in the world of visual arts, media, literature, or business. 39 Yet parallel to what commentators have described as a positive rendering of what is usually a negative ‘African exceptionalism,’ Afro-pessimist thinkers like Wilderson have contended that the

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