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Afropolitan Space Invading Between Neoliberalization and Africanization

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Afropolitan Space Invading Between Neoliberalization and Africanization Afropolitan Space Invading between Neoliberalization and Africanization Dissertation zur Erlangung des akademischen Grades Doktor der Philosophie in der Philosophischen Fakultät der Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen vorgelegt von Henning Steinfeld aus Dormagen 2018 Gedruckt mit Genehmigung der Philosophischen Fakultät der Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen Dekan: Prof. Dr. Jürgen Leonhardt Hauptberichterstatter: Prof. Dr. Dr. Russell West-Pavlov Mitberichterstatterin: Prof. Dr. Cordula Lemke Tag der mündlichen Prüfung: 26.10.2018 Universitätsbibliothek Tübingen, Online-Bibliotheksinformations- und Ausleihsystem, TOBIAS-lib Table of Contents 1 Introduction: Afropolitan space invading.........................................................................................1 2 Afropolitan space invading between neoliberalization and Africanization....................................15 2.1 Re-imagining cityscapes: The Afropolitan city in Teju Cole's Every Day is for the Thief (2007).............................................................................................................................................15 2.1.1 Neoliberal imaginaries....................................................................................................17 2.1.2 Post-neoliberal imaginaries.............................................................................................46 2.1.3 Stable ambivalences........................................................................................................58 2.2 The Afropolitan nomad in search of home: Dinaw Mengestu's The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears (2007).....................................................................................................................60 2.2.1 House..............................................................................................................................62 2.2.2 Workplace.......................................................................................................................69 2.2.3 Neigborhood....................................................................................................................77 2.2.4 Nation..............................................................................................................................85 2.2.5 Afropolitanism as nomadic search..................................................................................92 2.3 Making sense of Afropolitan spaces: Collective identities in Chika Unigwe's On Black Sisters' Street (2009)......................................................................................................................94 2.3.1 Legitimizing identities....................................................................................................96 2.3.2 Resistance identities......................................................................................................125 2.3.3 Project identities............................................................................................................139 2.4 The body on the Afropolitan labor market in Sefi Atta's A Bit of Difference (2013)...........144 2.4.1 The entrepreneurialized body: Bandele........................................................................146 2.4.2 The Africanized body: Deola........................................................................................165 2.4.3 Discursive Afropolitan bodies: Heterotopias................................................................183 3 Conclusion: Afropolitanizing cosmopolitan discourse................................................................186 4 Bibliography.................................................................................................................................192 Acknowledgements..........................................................................................................................234 1 Introduction: Afropolitan space invading The Afropolitan turn It was a couple of years ago that I came across the opening remarks of a Telegraph article composed by Gaby Wood about Taiye Selasi's first novel. Although Ghana Must Go had not been published yet, its author was already introduced as 'a superstar feted by the likes of Salman Rushdie' (Wood). In disbelief, I stared at the first lines then identifying Selasi as a mobile fashionista with a 'flamboyant personal style match[ing] the literary hype' (Wood) residing in Euro-America's most expensive cities and stressing her privileges produced by neoliberal capitalism while mocking others for their lack of mobilities: I'm not sure which to tell you about first – the book or the jacket. I don't mean the book's cover, that thing one is never supposed to judge. I mean the jacket the novelist is wearing when I meet her, the story of which takes up the first few minutes of our interview. It goes like this: though Taiye Selasi is intermittently based in New York and Rome, on the day she bought the jacket all of her clothes were in India, and somehow she found herself stuck in Hong Kong with nothing to wear (‘I mean, I was practically a refugee!’ she tells me) when there in a shop window was this item, designed by Alexander McQueen. She had to have it. Or, as she told the shop assistant, ‘Not only is it my size, it's my jacket. Do you see what I'm saying? Like, it's just confusing that it's in the display when it's mine.’ She paid a sum she has never spent on clothing before or since – and that includes the leather trousers she is wearing with it, for which she is quick to nod in gratitude to Helmut Lang. The jacket, made the year before McQueen died, is a kind of living museum piece: black, cinched, beautifully stitched, and transformed into something almost prehistoric when the sleeves are lifted. It also seems to say quite a bit about the person inside it: stylised, even understated in certain lights, but also, in its way, extreme. (Wood) I asked myself whether Wood was eventually writing about the same person, who, in her critically acclaimed (cf. Adejunmobi 52; Ede, “Politics” 88; Wasihun 391; Schmidt 177) essay Bye-Bye Babar in 2005, had portrayed herself as being part of the latest generation of African emigrants that were not only known for their 'funny blend of London fashion, New York jargon, African ethics, and academic successes' (“Bye-Bye”), but who also, dispersed across cities around the globe, had begun to redefine what it means to belong to 'Africans of the world' (“Bye-Bye”) through comprehending Africa's 'cultural complexity [and its] intellectual and spiritual legacy' (“Bye-Bye”). Wondering what the comforts of being able to afford Alexander McQueen jackets and Helmut Lang trousers while jet-setting the globe had to do with the self-image of being a world citizen with African entanglements, I continued the article, which then described Selasi and her work as representing something new, producing 'characters who are, to use a phrase that has become common but is, in fact, originally Selasi's own, ‘Afropolitan’' (Wood). I recalled Ghana Must Go: An affluent family with African roots, consisting of successful art stars, Yale graduates, editors, and surgeons scattered predominantly along the US East Coast, flies to Accra to attend the former family patriarch's burial and re-connects on his compound near Kokrobite. Selasi's novel, as much as her personal biography, gave the impression that Afropolitans were simply privileged global 1 citizens, through fiction, repositioning themselves in a neoliberalized capitalistic infrastructure. Towards the end of the article, however, Wood briefly referred to the Yoruba 'myths imported from Lagos' (Wood), which in Ghana Must Go not only help the twins Kehinde and Taiwo keep in contact through extrasensory perception implied by the ere ibeji myth (cf. A. White) but also encourage Sadie to disentangle herself from a competitive environment and accept her body through adapting to the Dipo rite (cf. Boakye). Notions of Africanness, Wood indicated, seemed to contest Selasi's neoliberalized realities and inform the Afropolitan's being in the world just as much. In the end, the Telegraph article put in a nutshell the two directions Afropolitanism has been headed after Bye-Bye Babar's publication. Especially a growing body of Afropolitan authors such as Teju Cole, Dinaw Mengestu, Chika Unigwe, or Sefi Atta have, through their fictions, revealed how Selasi's conceptual idea is located somewhere within the realms of global capitalism and Africanness, stirring up heated discussions and enhancing the scope of debates following the cosmopolitan turn (cf. Beck and Grande; Esperanca; Harvey, Cosmopolitanism 77-97) in the 1990s. Afropolitan fiction, the suggestion is, has picked up bits and pieces of cosmopolitan history but it has also used them to give cosmopolitan discourse a new direction. As a neologism, it combines the two words Afro and polites and relates to the ancient city-states of the Stoics and Cynics (cf. Josephides 2-3; Brown and Held 4-5) as well as Diogenes's image of the kosmo polites (cf. Nussbaum, Patriotism 7; Appiah, Cosmopolitanism xii), describing a privileged citizen who 'on the strength of birth or affinity, can call any place in Africa his or her place, while at the same time being open to the world' (Eze, “We” 114). Literary characters such as Cole's nameless narrator in Every Day is for the Thief, Sepha and Ayad in Mengestu's The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, Chisom, Ama, Alek, and Efe in Unigwe's On Black Sisters' Street, or Deola and
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