Afropolitanism and Afro-Chinese Worlds (original) (raw)

PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 2021

Abstract

DUNCAN M. YOON is assistant professor at New York University. His book manuscript “Alluvial Dreams: China in African Literature” received a Helen Tartar First Book Subvention Award from the American Comparative Literature Association in 2020. He was a Fulbright Scholar in South Korea in 2004 and a Kluge Fellow at the Library of Congress in 2018. Over the past decade or so, Afropolitanism has become a hotly contested term within literary studies, celebrated for its capacity to articulate an African experience of transnational mobility and success in theWest as well as criticized for how it elides the everyday experience of individuals on the continent and for its alleged lack of political critique. Many of these debates focus on the intended audience for Afropolitan texts, which, because of the location of publication houses and distribution networks, remains primarily the Western reader. My purpose in this introduction to alternative networks of Afropolitanism, however, is not to rehash this well-covered debate. Instead I would like to examine the shifting worlds of Afropolitanism as they manifest themselves through an engagement with East Asia, and with China in particular. My goal is less to map Afropolitanism, as it is understood in the West, directly onto Asia than to demonstrate how African literature imagines Asian worlds and, in doing so, redefines what qualifies as “worldliness.” My point of departure, then, is Achille Mbembe’s definition of Afropolitanism as “a cultural, historical, and aesthetic sensitivity” that points to “the interweaving of worlds, in a slow and sometimes incoherent dance with forms and signs . . . , the interweaving of the here and there, the presence of the elsewhere in the here and vice versa” (Mbembe and Chauvet 59–60). If there is one clear takeaway from my essay, it is that the Western subject is no longer the only Other against which postcolonial African identities conceptualize themselves. While such a relational identity is nothing new, I argue that it is time for a radical decentering of the West so that it is no longer the primary point of comparison for postcolonial literature. The two novels I use to support this reading are taken fromWest and East Africa: Guinea-Conakry and Kenya. The first is Ibrahima Soumah’s L’Afrique, un continent en voie de “chinisation” (Africa, a

Duncan M Yoon hasn't uploaded this paper.

Let Duncan know you want this paper to be uploaded.

Ask for this paper to be uploaded.