Teju Cole: Public intellectual

Abstract

ABSTRACT From collaborative experiments on Twitter to creative projects in word and image, Teju Cole’s work is characterised by connectivity and plasticity. Within the tradition of the public intellectual, it comes into focus as a mode of artistic activism, because it creates new publics through the use of social media and affords new insights in its protean erudition. Cole’s distinctive positionality as a public intellectual is theorised as an amalgam of Achille Mbembe’s Afropolitanism and Bruce Robbins’ cosmopolitanism. Characterised by “distant belongings,” this Afrocosmopolitanism informs Cole’s Tweets and contributions to other social media. It also infuses the essays in Known and Strange Things and the photographs and texts in Blind Spot and Human Archipelago with thoughtful reflection on and incisive questioning of the most pressing issues of our time. Cole’s aesthetic praxis is thus integral to his political stance as a public intellectual.