The New African Diaspora and Afropolitanism in the Work of Taiye Selasi

Of Ghanaian and Nigerian origin, raised between Britain and the US, Taiye Selasi is part of a larger group of African black writers such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Chris Abani, NoViolet Bulawayo, Teju Cole and Yaa Gyasi, among others, who live, teach and write in the US. This essay analyzes Selasi’s work with special reference to her 2005 article “Bye-Bye Babar”, in which she defines Afropolitanism, and her 2013 novel Ghana Must Go. Whilst the legacy of the concept of cosmopolitanism and the privileged status of her novel’s protagonists have occasioned critiques to the concept of Afropolitanism offered by Selasi, because of its exclusive idea of cultural globalism that many diasporic subjects cannot share, Afropolitanism is here tackled as a useful concept in complicating American and Black American relation to and perception of Africa. Both in her essay and novel, Africa emerges not just a reservoir for projections of Afrofuturism, as a nostalgic mother or a place of impossible return (Hartman), but as a proper dialogic member within the black diasporic community. Ghana Must Go, for example, tells of the dispersion into the world of first- and second-generation Ghanaian and Nigerian migrants, spread on three different continents (America, Europe and Africa), and of the limits of the idea of nation and culture to understand the global cultural circulation of the postcolonial African diaspora. In the novel, Africa does not emerge as a ‘dark continent’, but a part of the world’s modernity, claiming a right to narratively ‘go micro’ and to leave notions such as the nation or history at the margin of our definitions as human beings. This is what the Sais, Ghana Must Go’s protagonists, claim: theirs is a bittersweet story of success yet of loss, which nevertheless offers the opportunity to see beauty in moments of death.