An aesthetic, an ontology, a lifestyle. In its short twenty-first-century life, Afropolitanism has been accorded all of these distinct labels. For Taiye Selasi, the Afropolitan is a generational reality—the glamorous identity of the new African diaspora that does away with outdated stereotypes of “war [and] hunger” on the one hand and “pepper soup and filial piety” on the other (529, 530). Her viral manifesto, “Bye-Bye Barbar,” outlines the benefits that accrue when authenticity and rootedness cease to function as the only criteria for naming contemporary African phenomenology. For Achille Mbembe, Afropolitanism is movement, mobility, and circulation. Rooted in precolonial African forms of cosmopolitanism, Afropolitanism proposes the ideal means to live and thrive in multiracial modernity. Where African socialism and Pan-Africanism have become “institutionalized and ossified” (26), Afropolitans “measure up against not the village next door, but the world at large” (29). For Chielozona Eze, despite a worry that the term may enable an evasion of “the responsibility that comes with being African today” (114), to be Afropolitan requires that one cross “the psychic boundaries erected by nativism, autochthony, heritage and other mythologies of authenticity” (117).

Such movement across varied cultural and critical terrain does not always allow for theoretical clarity, and the Afropolitan as a concept has been much critiqued for naming everything and nothing at once. Leftist critics have challenged the exaltation of mobilities that mimic the flow of capital and asked for greater recognition of class as an analytic that structures contemporary migrations as well as forms of confinement and enclosure. Any number of African critics have deplored the elision of previous forms of internationalism, boldly declaring their own affinity for Pan-African solidarity rather than Afropolitan posturing.Footnote ¹ Moreover, despite privileging multiple local attachments and prioritizing a range of histories of migration, the discourse of Afropolitanism also ends up foregrounding award-winning writers who live and work in the United States. This means that Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's warning about “a single story” of Africa goes unheeded as tales of glossy consumption and unfettered circulation abound without a consideration of relations of power (“Danger”).

Even if one grants the need for diverse representations of Africa, including those of what we might call Crazy Rich Africans or “middle-class caged birds” (to quote Selasi [“From That Stranded Place” 160]), the incoherence of the Afropolitan persists along three lines: its claim of exception, its oscillation between a category of identity and a rubric for a body of literature, and its critical purchase in relation to longer histories of African letters. All these are thrown into sharper relief when placed against debates about the field of postcolonial literature in the United States academy in the 1980s and 1990s. To gain any conceptual clarity, we need to situate the current debate about Afropolitan literature and politics as a variation on long-standing arguments about the value of the local versus the global, the rooted versus the metropolitan, the subaltern as the ideal subject of postcolonial inquiry versus the transnational elite migrant. That the Afropolitan is a loose baggy monster may in fact be the reason for its viral diffusion, and it is vital to explore what the Afropolitan as symptom allows us to name that we otherwise couldn't.

To assess the claim of exception in relation to periodization and historicity, it is helpful to turn to Stuart Hall's field-defining essay “When Was ‘the Post-colonial’?” to determine what is new about the Afropolitan. Hall challenges those critics of the postcolonial turn who quarrel with its seeming depoliticization, its shift beyond Manichean binaries of colonizer and colonized, its suggestion that we are beyond colonialism, its elevation of culturalism over capitalism as frame of reference, and its rejection of essentialist notions of collectivity rooted in race or nation. He finds the potential of postcolonial thought in its focus on cultural translation, displacement, diaspora, and différance. Remarkably, all these criticisms of the postcolonial turn echo almost too perfectly the accusations lobbied against Afropolitanism today. Postcolonial literature was also variously said to be too broad and homogenizing (what makes a Zimbabwean novel similar to a Malaysian or Australian one?), elitist and identitarian (representing the elite writers and scholars who are a comprador intelligentsia rather than committed intellectuals), disconnected from the reality of the postcolony (referring in fact to writers who live and publish in the United States and Europe), inaccurate (naming as “post” colonial relations of power that continue to dominate), and too easily available for cooptation as exotic hybridity (think Salman Rushdie and magic realism) or distant tragedy (think poverty porn).Footnote ² Precisely because there is such reluctance on the part of readers and critics to grant humor, irony, or playfulness to writers from Africa or other parts of the world associated with tragedy or seen as mascots of resistance to capitalism, the choice to focus on beautiful siblings and family melodrama, as Selasi does in Ghana Must Go, or on the trials of romantic love amid discussion of hair braiding and women's magazines, as Adichie does in Americanah, invites discomfort and censure. Much of the promise of the Afropolitan also reiterates the same tenets of moving beyond race and nation as articulated in postcolonial studies of the late twentieth century. Precisely because contemporary discussions of the Afropolitan value the same principles of hybridity, mixture, and transversality that postcolonialism does, they beg the question of why earlier shifts beyond nationalist identities, aesthetic forms, and ontologies aren't sufficient.

In asking “When was the postcolonial?” Hall was also asking, “[W]hat should be included and excluded from its frame? Where is the invisible line between it and its ‘others’ (colonialism, neo-colonialism, Third World, imperialism), in relation to whose termination it ceaselessly, but without final supersession, marks itself?” (242). Similarly, Afropolitan as a concept retains an uneasy relation to its literary and historical genealogies. While the crux of the Afropolitan turn remains the failure of the postcolonial nation-state to deliver genuine liberation, the refusal to consider such numerous alternatives as Black and Third World internationalism, diaspora and Pan-Africanism, Afromodernism and socialism as important predecessors indicates a shaky historical foundation. No claim of exception can ground itself in such a flimsy conception of provenance and genealogy without substantial disavowal.

To ask “When was the Afropolitan?” thus involves reckoning more fully with the status of nation, not to revive an anachronistic language of liberation, but to fathom more fully both the potential and the pitfalls of such ideologies as negritude and Pan-Africanism, créolité and métissage, tricontinentalism and the Global South without concluding that all such movements are forms of what Tejumola Olaniyan terms “Afro-defensive nativism” (331). This point can be more fully instantiated with a consideration of Afropolitanism's resonances with and divergences from Paul Gilroy's massively influential model of the Black Atlantic. At first glance, there is little that differentiates the two. Gilroy's Black Atlantic intellectual, constituted by the pull of multiple relations to modernity best expressed by W. E. B. Du Bois's enduring metaphor of double consciousness, seems at once like the Afropolitan of the twenty-first century, eager to assert a relation to Africa but not defined by it.Footnote ³ “Afropean,” the term parallel to Afropolitan in the European context (Pitts), underscores the connections even more clearly, since Gilroy's central philosophical quandary was how to “be both European and black” (1). Yet a sharp difference between the Black Atlantic and the Afropolitan emerges in terms of orientation. Where Gilroy emphasized the history of violence and the memory of slavery as shaping a pained relation of Black Atlantic populations to the West, alienated from it and yet shackled to it, Afropolitans and Afropeans celebrate dislocation and entirely reject the model of trauma as constituting their identities. At the core of the Afropolitan paradigm is an insistence on stories of migration not rooted in Atlantic memories of slavery, thus unveiling multiple genealogies of diaspora as a corrective to the limits of Gilroy's United States–centric North Atlantic horizon.

In turning away from the frame of trauma and spectacles of suffering, amid the global proliferation of neo–slave narratives in the last few decades, Afropolitan writers usefully complicate received ideas of what an African writer or an African book is allowed to do, placing at the center of their narratives voices and experiences other than those defined by Atlantic slavery. In doing so, as I propose in Runaway Genres: The Global Afterlives of Slavery, such writers as Adichie, Selasi, Chris Abani, Teju Cole, NoViolet Bulawayo, and Dinaw Mengestu illuminate varied histories and afterlives of decolonization, shaping new imaginative geographies of being and belonging. They thus reckon with the question of whether a new relationship between race and narrative can emerge in the twenty-first century, removed from the repetition of the slave narrative's compromised quest for freedom. In an era of ascendant white supremacy, can the Afropolitan lead to new configurations of diaspora, less focused on self-constitution through trauma, more attuned to varied ways of figuring the local and the global? And can it do so without reaffirming the geopolitical hegemony of writers located in Western metropoles?

To further assess the claim of exception, it is also necessary to ascertain if the Afropolitan is best viewed as a radical break from the past, a wholly twenty-first-century creature emerging in the wake of postcolonial failure, or if useful continuities may be traced with prior experiments of Afromodernity. If we view the Afropolitan as singular to our times, it would then follow that the proper object of comparison would be other iconoclastic efforts to break away from received forms, such as the post-Black turn in African American literature, or various articulations of Afrofuturism and Afropessimism that take center stage in recent discussions of the African diaspora. Correspondingly, one could also chart new stories of racial formation in the context of the United States, stories that collide migration with slavery as an origin story, to diversify both American and postcolonial histories of the present. We could then think about generational models like the “children of 1965” (to use Min Hyoung Song's phrase for Asian American writers), leading to a greater dialogue between the Afropolitan model and United States ethnic history, locating the emergence of the Afropolitan within and against new social movements of the 1960s. Questions of model-minority formation and its various rebuttals, the rise and retreat of cultural nationalism during the civil rights era and its aftermath, the institutionalization of race and ethnic studies and women's and gender studies would all help explain the generational and geopolitical rise of the Afropolitan in the institutional and cultural life of the United States.

In contrast, we could easily develop a different genealogy of the Afropolitan, one that immerses us in African dreams of decolonization and national liberation. We could then see Adichie's Americanah as a reverse heart-of-darkness narrative exploring the longing to return home in the vein of Ama Ata Aidoo's Our Sister Killjoy. Cole's Open City would take us to V. S. Naipaul's The Enigma of Arrival and Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration to the North. And Tambu and Nyasha's struggles to navigate colonial education and Shona patriarchy in Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions would reverberate in Darling's quest for food, education, and friendship in Bulawayo's We Need New Names amid the depredations of Mugabe's Zimbabwe and immigrant precarity in the United States. Akwaeke Emezi and Helen Oyeyemi's varied attempts at estranging realism could be productively read alongside Amos Tutuola, Dambudzo Marechera, and Kojo Laing's prior fabulations of fantasy and folklore, myth and cosmology. Such connections take us beyond the presentist language of departure and diminishment, allowing us to rejuvenate foundational conversations by Frantz Fanon and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o about nation and resistance, revolution and what Fanon termed a “literature of combat” (193).

These speculations about literary genealogy take me to my second line of inquiry—the confusion surrounding the Afropolitan as an identity category or as a literary designation. Selasi, for instance, very clearly claims it as an individual label of identification but disavows it as a description of her fiction, stating that “Afropolitan is a personal identity. Fiction has no need for such things” (“African Literature” 64). While such a declaration is part of her larger effort to demystify and make less abstract a capacious rubric like African literature, recent discussions have focused on the Afropolitan as a figure for literary history, available for cultural analysis rather than sociology, exploring how the concept reshapes our understanding of the home and the world, the nation and the globe, and the possibilities it opens up or forecloses for African literary studies. Eva Knudsen and Ulla Rahbek, for instance, postulate an Afropolitan literary aesthetics, suggesting that the “trope of a mobility-induced anxiety … entwines place and self” in the works of such writers as Selasi, Adichie, Sefi Atta, and Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor (115). Feeling lost between a homeland and a host-land, Afropolitan anxiety is as much about cultural hybridity and unease about belonging as it is about being in transit as an existential condition.

Once again, such a claim resonates with prior discussions in postcolonial studies, immediately evoking the Fanonian diagnosis of the condition of the native as a neurosis generated by colonialism. Amid all the self-congratulatory rhetoric, then, the Afropolitan also seems afflicted by a nervous condition. Indeed, Selasi hints at something similar in “From That Stranded Place,” highlighting melancholy and alienation as the progenitors of her 2015 manifesto. To cohere the category of the Afropolitan novel, then, we will need something other than the existence of anxiety or alienation. Does the Afropolitan novel as category allow us to identify commonalities across a range of literary texts and to outline connections across comparative racial and colonial histories? It is worth recalling here previous classifications of outward-facing literature that doesn't take the nation as its horizon—including the extroverted African novel, third-generation Nigerian writing, and Black Atlantic, transnational, or diasporic fiction—all of which in some ways remain displacements of the category of postcolonial literature (Julien; Adesanmi and Dunton). As Olaniyan forcefully argues, “[T]here is virtually no field in the humanities and social sciences today in which postcolonial has not become a familiar productive analytical term.” He also asks us to “remember the early venomous opposition to ‘post-colonial,’ followed in short order by endless discoveries of its utility and its untamable capacity to lacerate us with uneaseful self-consciousness with each usage” (329). The frantic search for newer nomenclature not only indexes an endless battle between nation and diaspora (variously framed as local/global, regional/transnational, rooted/cosmopolitan) but also serves as a symptom of critical historical amnesia, a forgetting that leads to a never-ending cycle of rediscovering the true voice of the Third World other.

Moving away from programmatic declarations of the value or limits of the Afropolitan, the fictions of the new African diaspora bespeak a more complex representational politics, one that grapples with impasses like those outlined by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in her foundational essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Where Spivak identified a violent shuttling of the figure of the Third World woman between patriarchy and imperialism, we find today a similar epistemic oscillation between rendering the Afropolitan endotic or exotic, a sign of implacable difference or a universalist fetish. To invoke the subaltern in the same sentence as the Afropolitan may well sound immediately perverse. How did a field of study predicated on creating space for subaltern voice and consciousness outside the script of empire give way in a mere two decades to celebrations of consumerism and exotic African identities unencumbered by the violence of colonial history? Yet I want to propose that while the exact critical purchase of the Afropolitan remains murky, not least because of the various contradictory or incoherent ascriptions it carries, it remains useful to see the term as a placeholder, despite its ostensible perpetual motion. Just as we can trace the displacement in the meaning of the subaltern as a military term to Antonio Gramsci, to the efforts of subaltern studies historians in India, to Spivak's feminist poststructuralist amplification of subalternity, and its gradual diffusion in a range of specific contexts (from Latin American history to studies of Atlantic slavery) as well as its use as a more generalized figure for disempowerment and marginalization, what critical histories can we make visible when we retrace the historical conditions and literary desires that name the appearance of the Afropolitan?

As a placeholder, Afropolitan registers a number of critical desires. First, it figures a need for a frame other than trauma to represent African experiences of contemporary life. Next, it searches for a way of living beyond binary options of enduring social, economic, and political collapse at home or striving for immigrant precarity in the first world. The ability to choose between these options is determined by class and pinpoints the limits of a term that describes belonging and dislocation without explicit reference to economic conditions. Third, Afropolitanism seeks subjectivities outside the dichotomy of celebrations of cultural mixture on the one hand and diagnostics of alienation and neurosis on the other. The term and its short critical history outlined here index the still fraught dynamics of representation Spivak identified, as the two meanings of representation (proxy and portrait, speaking for politically and artistic rendering) continue to blur, no matter how much an African writer tries to separate them. The divided and dislocated Afropolitan subject can disclose larger histories of global migrations and border crossings, but only if critics relearn the task of “measuring silences” (Spivak 286), of striving to read beyond what the text cannot or will not say, or what critics are unable or unwilling to hear. Perhaps purity is not possible in our literary desires after all. Rather than serve as the final nail in the postcolonial coffin, then, Afropolitan literature may well return us to its core concerns. At its heart, Afropolitanism is about the failure of the postcolonial nation to deliver liberation, and because of its association with the figure of the cosmopolitan as a citizen of the world, it asks us to ponder more deeply the fraught meaning of citizenship and the reality of migration in the twenty-first century.

In closing, I invoke the Cameroonian American writer Imbolo Mbue, whose debut novel, Behold the Dreamers, seems exemplary of Afropolitanism at first glance. The million-dollar contract, the endorsement by Oprah's Book Club, the focus on the American dream in the Obama era all speak of precisely the corporate packaging of easy difference that critics highlight in the discourse around the new visibility of African writers in the United States. And yet, because it is set during the 2008 economic recession triggered by the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the novel refuses to reassert American exceptionalism or to champion immigrant assimilation. It makes sense, then, that Mbue's second novel, How Beautiful We Were, however uneven or incoherent, searches for the repressed language of revolutionary possibility that would return us to Fanonian principles of a fighting literature articulated in The Wretched of the Earth. Alongside Fanon's manifesto, Thula, the novel's young protagonist destined to lead the doomed fight of the indigenous community against a multinational oil corporation, reads Pedagogy of the Oppressed and The Communist Manifesto; she also learns anarchy from comrades in Greenwich Village and debates the value of violent and nonviolent forms of resistance with her seven age-mates who form the novel's episodic collective narrator. Mbue lovingly renders the fictional African village of Kosawa as a site of beauty and value, where “our spirits were whole” (259). Protecting Kosawa from state violence and corporate poisoning of water involves the dream “that we would die where we were born” (360). Refusing Afropolitan exaltations of rootless mobility, the novel returns us to essential postcolonial questions about revolution and collectivity, indigenous rights and local resistance to global capital. In doing so, its deliberate anachronism (the novel begins in 1980 but channels a flexible temporal schema) and the use of such familiar tropes as the madman, the outcast twins, and the chorus of children hearken back to such experiments as Chinua Achebe's Anthills of the Savannah, Ferdinand Oyono's Houseboy, Ngũgĩ's A Grain of Wheat, and Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions. In its emphasis on a young woman as revolutionary leader, the novel also recalls prior narratives from the diaspora: Michelle Cliff's No Telephone to Heaven and Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower. Mbue's How Beautiful We Were thus signals, perhaps, yet another dialectical turn toward what we may learn to call a post-Afropolitan literary landscape.