“…In 2007, Achille Mbembe posited Afropolitanism as a way of Africans being in the world and refusing the identity of victim. Since then, authors like Binyavanga Wainaina (), Brian Bwesigye (), Emma Dabiri () and Stephanie Santana () have critiqued the terms Afropolitan and Afropolitanism by indicating that they re‐centre the West as the ‘world’, privilege consumerism, commodify African culture and reproduce Western lifestyle. Unlike Selasi's definition of Afropolitan, Afropolitan Imagineering primarily pertains to the continent and similarly to Mbembe's definition; it is about the refusal of victim identity and assertion that Africa is part of the world.…”
Section: Afropolitan Imagineering and The Urban In Africamentioning
Ibadan, Nigeria, has been an outlier in the ranking of world‐class cities. But in the past seven years, amidst the circulating Africa Rising narrative, Ibadan has embarked on what I call an Afropolitan Imagineering project of owambe urbanism. Afropolitan Imagineering refers to the production of new images/narratives of Africa and Africans as world‐class and cosmopolitan. Owambe urbanism is a spatio‐temporal neoliberal project concerning destination, arrival and place‐making, which promises a shared and happy future for all urban dwellers. I argue that this promise of happiness is challenged by low‐income women who are cognizant that a shared and happy future is impossible when little effort is made to address social inequality in the present. They thus refuse to be ‘good’ citizens and invoke an alternative urban futurity through their embodied and imagined resistance.
“…In 2007, Achille Mbembe posited Afropolitanism as a way of Africans being in the world and refusing the identity of victim. Since then, authors like Binyavanga Wainaina (), Brian Bwesigye (), Emma Dabiri () and Stephanie Santana () have critiqued the terms Afropolitan and Afropolitanism by indicating that they re‐centre the West as the ‘world’, privilege consumerism, commodify African culture and reproduce Western lifestyle. Unlike Selasi's definition of Afropolitan, Afropolitan Imagineering primarily pertains to the continent and similarly to Mbembe's definition; it is about the refusal of victim identity and assertion that Africa is part of the world.…”
Section: Afropolitan Imagineering and The Urban In Africamentioning
Ibadan, Nigeria, has been an outlier in the ranking of world‐class cities. But in the past seven years, amidst the circulating Africa Rising narrative, Ibadan has embarked on what I call an Afropolitan Imagineering project of owambe urbanism. Afropolitan Imagineering refers to the production of new images/narratives of Africa and Africans as world‐class and cosmopolitan. Owambe urbanism is a spatio‐temporal neoliberal project concerning destination, arrival and place‐making, which promises a shared and happy future for all urban dwellers. I argue that this promise of happiness is challenged by low‐income women who are cognizant that a shared and happy future is impossible when little effort is made to address social inequality in the present. They thus refuse to be ‘good’ citizens and invoke an alternative urban futurity through their embodied and imagined resistance.
“…While the terms Afropolitan and Afropolitanism have been embraced as a celebration of African identity and ways of being global, it has been critiqued for privileging consumerism, commodifying African culture, reproducing western lifestyle and re‐centring the west as the “world” (Dabiri ; Santana ). Further, Grace Musila () has insightfully pointed out that Afropolitan and Afropolitanism are contradictory counternarratives because they further confirm colonial narratives about Africa as ungeographic:The very necessity of qualifying Africans’ being in the world only makes sense when we assume that, ordinarily, Africans are not of the world.…”
Section: Becoming Global: Afropolitanism and Afropolitan Imagineeringmentioning
Branded as “Africa's first luxury perfume”, the Scent of Africa perfume is a “scented declaration of progress”. Particularly fascinating is the commercial advertisement for the perfume, which I argue to be an “Afropolitan Imagineering” project that is intended to signal Africa's rise and its new association with global cosmopolitanism. At first glance, the Scent of Africa perfume advertisement seems to point to the ways in which Imagineering projects can reproduce colonial discourses about Africanness. However, in this article, I suggest that we complicate the advertisement and examine its subversive potential to decentre whiteness and celebrate Africanness while writing Africa into the world. Despite this subversion, I conclude that African worlding practices should disinherit the familiarity of Eurocentric geographic determinism that is embedded in Afropolitan Imagineering and instead become informed by afro‐futuristic imaginings and disidentification politics.
“…34 Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainaina, for example alleged that Selasi's view was fundamentally classist; she reserved modernity exclusively for a population who was wealthy enough to travel around the world. 35 Yet more centrally, what Selasi had argued was that Africa's new modern image should let go of a cultural integrity: instead, the future lay on the shoulders of those 'cultural mutts' with their 'European affect' and 'African ethos'.…”
This essay locates the concept of Afropolitanism, introduced in the mid‐2000s by Achille Mbembe and Taiye Selasi, inside a longer historiography on cosmopolitanism in Africa. Used to describe the multifarious ways that Africa is enmeshed in the world, today ‘Afropolitanism’ connects Africa's global metropolises, transnational cultures and mobile populations under a single analytic term, signifying the radical diversity that Africa possesses now and has throughout history. This essay argues that the idea of Afropolitanism has impacted theory on Africa in two ways. First, instead of regarding pluralism as a threat to state stability, Africa's cosmopolitan cities and zones are now thought to be harbingers of a new post‐racial political future; rather than supposing that states will progressively coalesce into defined nations, as per the organic analogy, ethnically heterogeneous states are increasingly upheld as ‘modern’. Second, Afropolitanism marks a radical shift from a longer history of black emancipatory thought. Contra 20th century Pan‐African and Afrocentrist endeavours to create a civilization based on the ‘African Personality’, proponents of Afropolitanism instead propose a world in which there can be no centre for Africa, no cultural integrity, only networks and flows.
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