Pluralising globality: Afropolitanism as epistemic self-assertion in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s <em>Americanah</em>

In From Bomba to Hip-Hop (2000: 193), the Afro-Latino American writer Juan Flores discusses the nature of community—comunidad in the Spanish. He says that it is both a phenomenon existing in something akin to a state of nature and as the result of deliberate human interventions. The comun part of comunidad is the element that does not require human intervention. The unidad part is where various forces in society use their situatedness and power to negotiate the nature and shape of the community. Differently situated groups in society have different capacities to shape the nature of the community in which they are co-existing. Their place in a continuum ranging from epistemic and sociopolitical agents to mere states of affairs determines their discursive capacity to shape their world. In this article, I will argue that Afropolitanism should be seen as an attempt by African and Afrodescendant writers to stake a claim in the unidad processes and practices through which a becoming-one-again global oecumene is making and remaking itself. I will argue that Afropolitanism is a crucial effort at pluralising the ways of knowing, being and relating. Based on an analysis of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah (2013), I will show how African and Afrodescendant writers are playing an important role in dismantling colonial and postcolonial epistemic genealogies and their conceptions of globality. I will demonstrate Afropolitanism’s potential to challenge the epistemic, sociopolitical, economic and physical immobilisation of the African and Afrodescendant subjects—narratively and discursively bringing into view these stigmatised and silenced subjects.