Afropolitan projects: African immigrant identities and solidarities in the United States

ABSTRACT

This article explores how Africans born or raised in the United States employ ethnicity to understand their racial and cultural identities. I argue that African immigrants engage positive narratives about Africa along with their experiences of anti-black racism to articulate identities as “Africans of the world”. I call this articulation of identity Afropolitan projects. The Afropolitan as an ethnicity is not meant to shield Africans from anti-black racism, but instead helps articulate a particular relationship to this form of inequality. The following analysis derives from a qualitative case study of a voluntary association comprising Ghanaians primarily raised in the United States. I find that the group’s identity is as much about being black, African, and American as it is about being middle-class, Christian, and heterosexual. Through their Afropolitan projects, this group emphasizes solidarities with a global middle-class heterosexual patriarchy while foreclosing solidarities with working class, queer, and other people of colour.

KEYWORDS:

• African immigrants
• Afropolitan
• black identities
• ethnicity
• hybridity
• solidarity

Acknowledgements

I thank Ben Carrington, Shantel Buggs, Kathy Hill, and Christine Williams for their support and advice in relation to this paper. Many thanks as well to the members of MCGH for sharing part of their lives with me, and to the reviewers for their valuable comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 With few notable exceptions in academic spaces, including Gikandi (2010), Mbembe (2007), and in the Journal of African Cultural Studies, the term Afropolitan is primarily employed in popular culture, on the Internet, and in selling commodities. For example, in 2014, Blitz the Ambassador, a Ghanaian born hip-hop artist living in Brooklyn, released an album titled Afropolitan Dreams; an online shop selling African-derived clothing and accessories calls itself the Afropolitan shop; Meet-Up groups in urban centres around the United States for young Africans call themselves Afropolitan (such as Afropolitan HTX, Afropolitan NYC, and Afropolitan Miami); an online feminist blog by ‘Nigerian-Finnish writer’ Minna Salami is titled MsAfropolitan. These are only a few examples of the ways in which Africans living outside of Africa are using Afropolitan. I have not come across the term used by Africans in Africa.

2 See White (2001) for a discussion of how the quest for respectability encourages conformity to larger social norms without challenging its racist and gendered logics.

3 I resist using the language of immigrant generations because in many ways, it marks some Americans, in particular racialized Americans, as always-alien citizens, not quite belonging to the symbolic boundaries of the nation (see Ngai 2004). The racial exclusiveness of generational language guides me to refer to MCGH members as U.S.-born or raised Ghanaians. I call group members Ghanaians in recognition of their chosen identity as such.

4 Official membership exceeds twenty people, however in the year and a half that I conducted observations a core of about twenty members actively participated at volunteer events and meetings. More members always showed up at parties and other fun social activities.

5 Neal (2016) has recently invoked Afropolitan to include African-Americans.

6 In “Bye-Bye Babar” Selasi posits racial identity as a matter of politics rather than pigment, noting, “not all of us [Afropolitans] claim to be black”.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Urban Ethnography Lab, The University of Texas at Austin; Center for Women’s and Gender Studies, The University of Texas at Austin; and College of Liberal Arts, The University of Texas at Austin.