Do afropolitismo

A autora Taiye Selasi na Holanda, na apresentação do seu primeiro romance "Ghana must go" (imagem retirada de Think Africa Press)

Em Fevereiro 2013, Stephanie Bosch Santana comentava o discurso de Binyavanga Wainaina "I am a Pan-Africanist, not an Afropolitan", proferido em Setembro 2012 na conferência da African Studies Association UK. No seu artigo Exorcizing afropolitanism, Santana escrevia:

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.

O debate à volta do afropolitismo continua aceso. Um dos mais recentes textos é de Marta Tveit em Think Africa Press, intitulado The Afropolitan must go. Criticando Taiye Selasi - autora, entre outos, de ensaio Bye Bye Barbar, or What is an Afropolitan -, Tveit escreve:

I am angry for different reasons to Wainaina (though if he wanted to hang out sometime I’m sure we could have fun being pissed off together); I am not so much concerned with the commodification inherent in Afropolitanism as I am with the danger of reproducing a reductive narrative, one which implicitly licenses others to reproduce the same narrative because it has been confirmed by an ‘Afropolitan’ herself.