how to write about africa binyavanga wainaina analysis

His interest is not only in Tuakli-Wosornu’s “global Africans” but also in the world in Africa. They (read: we) are Afropolitans-the newest generation of African emigrants, coming soon or collected already at a law firm/chem lab/jazz lounge near you.” Achille Mbembe later popularized this term in academic discourse with his 2006 essay “Afropolitanism,” in which he attempts to reterritorialize Afropolitanism, in part by drawing attention to the long history of migration to, from, and within the African continent. She writes, “Like so many African young people working and living in cities around the globe, they belong to no single geography, but feel at home in many.

Tuakli-Wosornu uses the term primarily to describe Africans living, and often born outside of, the continent. The origin of this portmanteau (created out of the words ‘African’ and ‘cosmopolitanism’) is usually traced to an article titled “Bye-Bye Barbar” by Taiye Tuakli-Wosornu, published in the LIP Magazine in 2005. Wainaina’s address was a kind of exorcism in its own right, an attempt to rid African literary and cultural studies of the ghost of Afropolitanism, a term that perhaps once held promise as a new theoretical lens and important counterweight to Afro-pessimism, but that has increasingly come to stand for empty style and culture commodification. It turns out that Katie’s idea was more fitting than I first realized.

When I told Katie Reid of AiW that Wainaina’s lecture was haunting me, she suggested that “Africa in Words” might be an ideal space to “exorcise” these spirits. If many earlier African print publications-such as popular magazines and newspapers-have been described as “ephemeral,” the new literary world that Wainaina depicts is distinctly spectral. Traces of Binyavanga Wainaina’s address, “I am a Pan-Africanist, not an Afropolitan”, delivered at September’s African Studies Association UK 2012 conference, have lingered with me over the past few months: the image of invisible digital networks of texts reaching ghost-like across continents, genre-bending “digital pulp,” and a pan-African literature that moves via twitter and sms rather than by printing press and shipping container. Binyavanga Wainaina, writer and founding editor of the Kenyan literary magazine, Kwani?

How to write about africa binyavanga wainaina analysis