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4 Negotiating Singularity and Alikeness Musila , Grace ( 2016 ) 53 Review Copy – Not for Redistribution Emilia Maria Duran Almarza - University of Oviedo - 01/10/2020 Mengiste , Maaza ( 2013 ). ‘ What Makes a “Real African”? ’ The Guardian . 7 July . 24 Feb. 2016 <http://www. theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jul/07/african-writers-caine-prize> Mignolo , Walter D. ( 2000 ). ‘ The Many Faces of Cosmo-polis: Border Thinking and Critical Cosmopolitanism .’ Public Culture. 12 . 3 : 721 – 748 . Morrison , Toni ( 1999 ). The Bluest Eye . [ 1979 ]. New York , NY : Vintage . Morrison , Toni ( 2005 ). Beloved . [1987] . London : Vintage . 4 Negotiating singularity and alikeness Musila , Grace ( 2016 ). ‘ Part-Time Africans, Europolitans and ‘Africa Lite .’ Journal of African Cultural Studies 28 . 1 : 109 – 113 . Esi Edugyan, Lawrence Hill and Canadian Afrodiasporic writing NAACP ( 2016 ). ‘ Doctors Kenneth and Mamie Clark and the “Doll Test” ’. 23 September 2016 . 23 Sep. 2016 <http://www.naacpldf.org/brown-at-60-the-doll-test> . Isabel Carrera-Suárez Njami , Simon ( 2007 ). ‘ Chaos and Metamorphosis ’. Africa Remix: Contemporary Art of a Continent . Ed Simon Njami . Johannesburg : Jacana . 13 – 21 . Nussbaum , Martha C. ( 1996 ). For Love of Country? Ed Joshua Cohen . Boston , MA : Beacon P . Ojwang , Dan and Titlestad , Michael ( 2014 ). ‘ African Writing Blurs into “World” Literature ’. Mail & Guardian . 4 April . 16 Jan. 2016 . <https://mg.co.za/article/2014-04-03-african-writing-blurs-into- world-literature> . ABSTRACT Okri , Ben ( 2014 ). ‘ A Mental Tyranny is Keeping Black Writers from Greatness ’. The Guardian . 27 December . Approaching the concept of the Afropolitan as one among various 8 Jan. 2016 <http://theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/dec/27/mental-tyranny-black-writers> . contemporary endeavours to redefi ne Afrodiasporic identities, this Patterson , Orlando ( 1982 ). Slavery and the Social Death: A Comparative Study . Cambridge, Massachusetts : article compares Selasi’s gesture of self-naming to the debates on terminology and affi liation engaged in by Canadian Afrodiasporic Harvard UP . writers, which shift between demanding recognition in the national Pollock , Sheldon , Bhabha , Homi K. , Breckenridge , Carol A. , and Chakrabarty , Dipesh ( 2000 ). imaginary and declaring allegiance to the African diaspora. Focusing ‘ Cosmopolitanisms .’ Public Culture 12 . 3 : 577 – 589 . on belonging, alikeness and (creative) singularity in the Kreisel lectures Sartre , Jean-Paul ( 1973 ). Existentialism and Humanism . London : Methuen . delivered by Esi Edugyan and Lawrence Hill, it proposes that a reading Selasi , Taiye ( 2005 ). ‘ Bye-Bye Babar ’. 3 March . 10 Jan. 2015 . <http://thelip.robertsharp.co.uk/?p=76> . within recent theories of diaspora and neo-cosmopolitanism may Selasi , Taiye ( 2013a ). Ghana Must Go . London : Penguin . provide an interpretive framework for the apparently contradictory Selasi , Taiye ( 2013b ). ‘ Taiye Selasi on Discovering her Pride in her African Roots ’. The Guardian . 22 March . allegiances and the open citizenship practiced by Afrodiasporic 11 Jun. 2015 <http://theguardian.com/books/2013/mar/22/taiye-selasi-afropolitan-memoir> . writers. Selasi , Taiye ( 2013c ). ‘ African Literature Doesn’t Exist ’. 11 Jun. 2015 <http://www.literaturfestival.com/ archiv/eroeff nungsreden/die-festivalprogramme-der-letzten-jahre/Openingspeach2013_English. pdf> . At the heart of Taiye Selasi’s formulation of the concept of the Afropolitan (Selasi, 2005 ) lies, Selasi , Taiye ( 2014a ). ‘ I’m a Multi-local African ’. 6 February . 10 Apr. 2016 . <https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=4XgRINx5mj4> . among other issues, a personal rebellion against the repeated essentialising of African and Selasi , Taiye ( 2014b ). ‘ Don’t Ask Where I’m From, Ask Where I’m Local ’. October . 8 Dec. 2015 . <https://www. Afrodiasporic subjects, fuelling a desire to practise an alternative self-definition which may ted.com/talks/taiye_selasi_don_t_ask_where_i_m_from_ask_where_i_m_a_local?language=en> . allow the author, and others in her generation, to position themselves in a globalised, urban, Selasi , Taiye ( 2015 ). ‘ Taiye Selsi: Stop Pigeonholing African Writers ’. The Guardian . 4 July . 12 Jul. 2015 mutilocal world. Her neologism Afropolitan clearly appealed to a very extended desire in a <https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jul/04/taiye-selasi-stop-pigeonholing-african-writers> . variety of diasporic Africans around the world, given its subsequent proliferation in popular, Stephanides , Stephano , and Karayanni , Stavros ( 2015 ). Vernacular Worlds, Cosmopolitan Imagination . Leiden and Boston : Brill/Rodopi . consumerist and intellectual spheres. In the academic world, prone to coinage of terminol- Toivanen , Anna-Leena ( 2015 ). ‘ Not at Home in the World: Abject Mobilities in Marie NDiaye’s Trois ogy, sometimes in its own version of consumerism, the concept has been as much debated femmes puissantes and NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names .’ Postcolonial Text 10 . 1 : 1 – 18 . and critiqued as outside the academy. Whether the neologism is a useful or accurate ana- Tveit , Marta ( 2013 ). ‘ The Afropolitan Must Go ’. 27 November . 10 Jan. 2015 . <http://africasacountry. lytical category in a variety of research fields is, of course, a suitably academic concern. My com/2013/11/the-afropolitan-must-go/> . own intervention here will attempt not so much to judge the convenience of its existence Vice , Samantha ( 2010 ). ‘ How Do I Live in This Strange Place? ’ Journal of Social Philosophy 41 . 3 : 323 – 342 . or application to cultural and literary analysis, as to read its significance in parallel to other Wainaina , Binyavanga ( 2008 )’. How to Write about Africa ’. Granta . 12 Jul. 2015 . <http://granta.com/ how-to-write-about-africa/> . examples of Black/African self-designation, in this case in the context of a specific nation, Wright , Michelle M. ( 2013 ). ‘ Can I call you Black? The limits of authentic heteronormativity in African Canada, whose iconicity as official multicultural state may offer an instructive vantage point Diasporic discourse .’ African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal 6 . 1 : 3 – 16 . for comparison. Wright , Michelle ( 2015 ). Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology . Minneapolis , Taiye Selasi’s act of self-naming is only one of recent attempts to redefine various MN : U of Minnesota P . Afrodescendent subjectivities which do not concur with stereotypical ideas of ‘Africa’ (as portrayed by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in ‘The Danger of a Single Story’, 2009 ) nor are coterminous with the subjectivities of those descended from transported slaves or from 54 Review Copy – Not for Redistribution 54 Emilia Maria Duran AlmarzaDEBATING - THE University AFROPOLITAN of Oviedo - 01/10/2020 early migrants. With contemporary ‘Africanness’ no longer conceived necessarily in opposi- tion to ‘Westernness’, the complexities of Black diasporas across the world are being fore- grounded and analysed from within and from multiple geolocalisations. Black writers in Canada have been dissecting such complexities for several decades, in both national and transnational frameworks1 . They have done so from the relatively peripheral position occu- pied by their country in global cultural affairs, but also from the nuanced and articulate discourse derived from years of multicultural practice and critique, in a culture which has, however imperfectly, allowed difference into its imagined self. Canada’s ‘hyphenated iden- tities’, ‘visible minorities’ and immigrant dwellers are, together with First Nations, recognised constituents of Canadian citizenship. And yet, African Canadian and Black Canadian subjec- tivities have been unearthed in their varying historical dimensions only in relatively recent times, with writers playing an active role in the research and dissemination of this new knowledge. The rapid manner in which the Canadian cultural scene has incorporated and been shaped by Black Canadians (as well as other visible minorities) since the 1990s, and the depth of the ensuing debates, are impressive developments which may, nevertheless, veil the as yet unnaturalised citizenship and ‘belonging’ of many of its actors. By focusing on Esi Edugyan’s and Lawrence Hill’s respective Henry Kreisel lectures, Dreaming of Elsewhere ( 2014 ) and Dear Sir, I Intend to Burn Your Book ( 2013 ), which relate directly to the novels that established each of them as international writers, Half - Blood Blues ( 2011 ) and The Book of Negroes ( 2007 ), I will engage with the commonalities and yet singular character of the writerly stances and practices of these two second-generation Canadians, in an attempt to assess some of the long-standing complications of those ‘old’, apparently resolved, diasporic concepts of home and belonging, of local and transnational allegiances. For this purpose I will discuss Edugyan’s and Hill’s Kreisel lectures, first in the context of Canadian redefinitions of Blackness and then in light of recent approaches to neo- cosmopolitanism. Such an analysis may help to gauge the extent to which Canadian debates, and particularly these two authors’ stances and practices, may relate to ‘Afropolitanism’, and whether their strategic positions may be read through the lens of what Sneja Gunew ( 2017 ) has recently described as the ‘neo-cosmopolitan mediation’ of post-multicultural writers. Debating the Afro-Canadian The history of Black Canadians is today fairly well documented, and extends back almost as far as transatlantic settlement. 2 A small number
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