Afropolitan Lisbon: emerging geographies of Afro-descendant cosmopolitanism

Abstract

This article explores the articulations of Afropolitanism in contemporary Portuguese literature, by authors of African descent, in terms of identity, aesthetics, ethics and politics. In the famous essay that popularised the term ‘Afropolitan,’ Taiye Selasi places this new ‘African of the world’ on the move between Africa and invariably at least one G7 city (Selasi, “Bye-Bye Babar” [2005]). This article aims to bring the notion of Afropolitanism developed by Selasi and shortly afterwards further developed by Achille Mbembe to the context of the European semi-periphery and Afro-descendant literature in Portuguese (Mbembe, “Afropolitanism” [2007]). On the one hand, I will show how writers of African descent in contemporary Portugal (Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida and Kalaf Epalanga) have recently reclaimed forms of Afropolitan identity affirmatively from Lisbon, de-centring the trajectories celebrated by Selasi and, consequently, bringing new geographies to African cosmopolitanism. On the other hand, I will argue that the Afropolitanism articulated by this group of writers, reformulated and situated in the post-colonial Lusophone context, has also responded to some of the criticisms levelled at the very notion of Afropolitan identity proposed by Selasi, making a relevant contribution to the contemporary debate on the ethical, aesthetic, and political dimensions of Afropolitanism.