Celebrating Afropolitan Identities? Contemporary African World Literatures in English

Abstract

AbstractAgainst the background of today’s debate on Afropolitanism, this article discusses three contemporary African novels as instances of world literatures, focusing on their creative modelling of open, non-Eurocentric worlds in motion. Taking existing research in the field of world literature into account, we argue that the affective and effective uniqueness of world literatures only comes to the fore when considering their distinct power to creatively make worlds. We suggest understanding world literatures in terms of their capacity to create open, polycentric worlds, which enmesh diverse places, multiple temporalities, situated practices and locally grounded experiences into open networks of reciprocal change. In theorizing world literatures as pluralized and multiple, we also try to overcome the privileging of western literature. The final section negotiates how these imaginative worlds interact, intersect and possibly collide with that world which is configured by labelling, marketing and canonizing a specific text as ‘world literature’.