Afropolitanism and the end of Black nationalism

Abstract

This chapter demonstrates Afropolitanism's departure from a long genealogy of Afro-emancipatory thought. It argues that, contrary to the fundamental unity proposed by Pan-Africanism, Afropolitanism reopens the question of who constitutes the African, especially regarding the ancestors of those dispersed from the continent by slavery. In disentangling Blackness from Africa, Afropolitanism disavows longstanding racial solidarities that have cohered diaspora for the sake of liberation. Black nationalism problematizes the African diaspora as an unsolved ethical problem, and hence, a history that cannot be forgotten. To a large extent, the discourses that have concerned African multiracialisms have regarded the African metropolis, or as it is sometimes called, the Afropolis. The modernity of Afropolitanism coheres in the openness and indeterminacy suggested by multiracial circumstances. The chapter concludes by arguing that Afropolitanism can never account for an ethic of migration until it deals with the inverse problem–that is, the question of diaspora.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 25 citations exist upstream.