Susanne Gehrmann

Cosmopolitanism with African roots: Afropolitanism's ambivalent mobilities

This paper explores some aspects of the controversy which is now surrounding Afropolitanism, and examines the philosophical and literary output in relation to the concept. Mobility between spaces, in the cosmopolitan tradition, as well as digital mobility and visibility through the use of social media, are considered as key elements of Afropolitanism as a diasporic movement. So Afropolitanism can be described as a form of cosmopolitanism with African roots. However, the commodification of the term as a brand, and the class bias of Afropolitan lifestyle are more problematic. In the second part of the paper, the positions of African intellectuals are shown to convey more philosophical depth and moral relevance to Afropolitanism. In this vision of the concept, as it was initiated by Achille Mbembe, Afropolitanism is relevant for both the diaspora and for Africa. Afropolitanism in this understanding of it decentres, de-essentializes and valorizes the continent. The paper closes with readings of two novels of celebrated writers of the Afropolitan generation, namely Taiye Selasis Ghana Must Go and Teju Coles Open City. These novels feature complex Afropolitan characters and create a dense literary landscape through which to explore contemporary Afro-diasporic identity politics. The spatial and cultural mobilities expressed in this literature confirm Mbembes repositioning of Africa as a philosophical locus of passage and mobility.

Of Degenerated Heroes and Failed Romance: King Léopold’s Congo in Popular European Literatures

Heart of Darkness is certainly the most important founding text for a literary tradition of representing the Congo. Yet at the historical moment, it was just one text in a much larger corpus of travel writing, reports, pamphlets and fiction that formed a discourse on the so-called Congo atrocities, a subject which provoked heated debate among colonial powers at the time. The larger discursive formation has political implications for Europe and the colonial politics of the day. This article explores the contribution of popular genres, including adventure and romance fiction, to the representation of the particular crimes committed in the Congo Free State. Focussing on Henri de Vere Stacpoole’s The Pools of Silence (1909) and Arnaldo Cipolla’s L’Airone: Romanzo dei fiumi equatoriali (1920), I argue that contemporary fiction served to construct the Congo as a space of terror and degeneration while simultaneously employing discursive patterns and images taken from contemporary political debates about the Free State in the wake of Roger Casement’s 1904 Report. As I show, colonial competition between European nations exerted a shaping influence upon both the terms and reception of these popular works.

Black Masculinity, Migration and Psychological Crisis — A Reading of Simon Njami’s

The construction of African male blackness is read against the backdrop of Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, a text that informed the writings of Simon Njami as well as of authors such as Dambudzo Merechara, Dillibe Onyeama, and Daniel Biyaoula. Njami’s African Gigolo exposes the ‘pathological patterns’ of male behaviour and the mythical image of black male sexuality to be structurally rooted in (historically established) reciprocal assumptions about Euro-African gendered encounters.