Contemporary African mediations of affect and access

Abstract

Across Africa, new affective collectivities are shifting the terms within which access to economic opportunity, social belonging, and political agency have historically been understood. Recent years have seen powerful waves of civic mobilization sweep across the continent. Other, less prominent articulations of contemporary political desire have also found expression through the diffuse experiences of the African everyday and its cultural registers. As differential access to global capitalism and its promises folds into modes of subjection – and escape – that are hard to predict, those who exercise power find ever more elastic and resourceful ways of guarding the borders and memberships of privileged groups. This special issue turns to the critically entangled terms of affect and access as a basis for exploring emergent orientations in the field of African cultural theory. It especially highlights scholarly engagement with the shifting coordinates of political and social participation on and beyond the African continent, where complex assemblages of affective attachment, exchange, and realignment are inextricable from demands for socio-political and economic forms of access.