Editorial Statement: African Cultural Studies

In many of the impressive cultural analyses emanating from South Africa and reaching us in foreign political skies, there is an implicit assumption that the founding moment of cultural studies in South Africa is the same as that which founded British Cultural Studies … . What is even more astonishing, is the assumption that cultural studies in South Africa is merely the continuation of English cultural studies on a different historical plane.

(Ntongela Masilela 1988, p. 2)

The cultural studies borderland … is not a power-free site for unrestrained and heteroglossic dialogue and exchange, but a contested terrain where concrete, differentially positioned subjects have to forge particular strategies to speak and be heard.

(Ien Ang 1998, p. 20)

Introduction

We offer this issue on the theme ‘African Cultural Studies’, both enthusiastically and with some ambivalence. On the one hand, as two collaborating Africans, we are enthused about the publication of an issue of Cultural Studies dedicated to African Cultural Studies. This journal issue adds to our individual and collaborative efforts to contribute to the mapping and development of a plurality of African cultural studies and to making a space for African approaches in the evolving international discourse of cultural studies. On the other hand, we are uneasy about the dangers (e.g. homogenization, impreciseness, exclusivity, incompleteness, blinkered nationalism, reproduction of problematic power relations) that exist or constantly threaten to emerge in nation-based and region-based traditions of cultural studies. We share this general unease with others such as Stuart Hall (1992) who has described British cultural studies as ‘a pretty awkward signifier’ (p. 277) and Larry Grossberg who observed that ‘the claims of national traditions are generally wrong headed … .’ (quoted in Wright 2001, p. 155). Our preference is for a transnational cultural studies (e.g. Ang 1998, Chen 1992, O'Connor 1993, Spivak, 1993). The reality, however, is that cultural studies has evolved and continues to evolve primarily along regional lines and however uncomfortable that might make some of us, there is no way to put the genie of say British cultural studies back in the bottle of cultural studies history. Thus, there are national versions of cultural studies in a few African countries (e.g. one can discern different kinds of South African cultural studies) as well as a much looser discursive formation that can be labelled African cultural studies. We are engaged in two critical and seemingly contradictory tasks; first to contribute to the development of African cultural studies and second, to promote and contribute to the development of transnational cultural studies. Our position is that as it develops and if it is taken up as an integral aspect of the internationalization of cultural studies, African cultural studies can contribute to the evolution of transnational cultural studies.

Despite some of the dangers, there is potential collective strength in African cultural studies, especially in the international context of cultural studies. While internationally dominant region-based versions of cultural studies (read British and American) are readily recognizable and engaged around the world, marginal versions have been restricted for the most part to their own locations, save for interesting flashes that momentarily interrupt an international cultural studies gaze fixed on the centre [e.g. special issue of Cultural Studies on Nordic Cultural Studies (Eskola and Vainikkala 1994)]; inclusion of essays on the institutionalization of Turkish cultural studies in a themed journal issue of International Journal of Cultural Studies (Maton and Wright 2002). The more substantial of these flashes (e.g. a journal special issue), we believe (or is that hope?), are more likely to be noticed, recognized and considered (however fleetingly) for their distinctness. It is our hope that this journal issue will contribute to the evolution of both African cultural studies as well as transnational cultural studies.

Ntongela Masilela's nativization and other conceptions of African cultural studies

While Ntongela Masilela might not be a household name in international cultural studies discourse, he is for the two of us, and we would suggest ought to be for African cultural studies in general, a touchstone for the development of both South African cultural studies in particular and African cultural studies in general. In this editorial we return time and again to Masilela's brief but quite significant intervention as a point of reference for our observations on African cultural studies. Masilela (1988) wrote a preface to what is probably one of the earliest self-identified edited book of essays on South African cultural studies, namely Keyan Tomaselli's (1989) Rethinking Culture. As South African, and indeed African cultural studies grow and spread, they do so around Masilela's trenchant reservations, recommendations, admonishments and vision. These constitute an originary argument about one strand of African cultural studies, namely, nativization, which Masilela articulated in reaction to what he perceived as merely derivative African cultural studies which simply appropriated British cultural studies and at best applied it to the South African context. Our own preference is for a third strand which occupies a middle ground where African cultural studies draws on aspects of both nativist and derivative cultural studies and is developed in conversation with international cultural studies (Kanneh 1998, Wright 2004).

In his brief preface, entitled ‘Establishing an Intellectual Bridgehead’, Masilela appealed for a ‘nativisation’ of cultural studies in South Africa (cf. Kerr 1989). This task, he suggested, would occur in the context of ‘Africanization’ which he describes as the re-orientation of intellectual and historical perspectives of cultural studies in terms of African cultural trajectories and history. Masilela thus forward-thinkingly linked South Africa to the continent as a whole at a time when the cultural boycott and international pressure on apartheid was at its peak. Significantly, then, in compiling this themed issue of Cultural Studies we found ourselves selecting papers from a predominance of South African authored-submissions. These authors (not all of whom are included here) tended to be well-located in dominant Western cultural studies paradigms familiar to readers of this journal. However, we wanted to also incorporate studies which have grown more directly from African contexts, as Masilela recommended, ones which draw on African philosophies and indigenous frames of reference. Cultural studies, as Wright has argued (1998), has emerged in many different forms on different continents and conditions, each developing unique characteristics, in answering often the same questions. We wanted something of this specificity to shine through this issue.

We have mentioned one primary framework for conceptualizing African cultural studies, namely its relationship with African intellectual work on the one hand and outer-continental work on the other hand (the results of which are derivative/appropriated cultural studies in Africa, nativized African cultural studies and a version of cultural studies which draws on both and is articulated in conversation with international cultural studies). Another framework involves the location of Africans: the discourse of African cultural studies is being developed primarily by Africans on the continent as well as African émigrés in the diaspora. In writing the preface for Tomaselli's edited collection, Masilela, a South African writing from exile in the US, made one of the first outer-continental interventions in the development of African cultural studies. Our own collaboration reflects and continues this dual source of development of African cultural studies. One of us, Handel Kashope Wright, is a Sierra Leonean who was introduced to cultural studies while undertaking graduate studies in Canada, has taught in the US and now teaches cultural studies and education in Canada. The other, Keyan Tomaselli, is a South African who teaches media and cultural studies in South Africa, and has been instrumental in the development of South African and African media studies and an indigenized cultural studies. We have also selected essays to reflect both continental African voices (Lize van Robbroeck and Natasha Distiller from South Africa, Fibian Kavulani Lukalo from Kenya, Sunday Enessi Ododo from Nigeria) and voices of Africans living in the diaspora (Boulou de B'beri- Cameroonian in Canada, Awad Ibrahim- Sudanese in the US, Ali Abdi- Somalian in Canada). In addition to these two principal sets of contributors, there are also diasporic Africans (used here in the albeit problematic loose sense that references black people outside the continent) and Africanists who are contributing to the development of African cultural studies and the former of this last two categories is represented by Glenn Jordan (an African American who is a long time resident in Wales) and his contribution to this themed issue (Jordan 1973).

Themes and issues in African cultural studies

In issuing the Call for Papers for this themed issue, we identified a number of possible sub-themes:

• Post-apartheid and democratization issues. Crucial here are issues of essentialism, the divine rights of monarchy, the role of the ancestors, patriarchy/feminism and so on.

• Debates on identity and the dis/connections between continental and diasporic constructions.

• Cultural studies deriving from performative contexts, such as various forms of popular theatre, their relation to Freirian pedagogic principles, action research, education and resistance.

• Issues and debates around Africanization/indigenization of different kinds of cultural studies in different parts of Africa.

• The relationship between African philosophical approaches and cultural studies.

• Comparative analysis between ‘Western’ cultural studies and African approaches, and the nature of their engagement with the former.

With the caveat that these are the selections of two individuals rather than a definitive, authoritative statement about the status quo of African cultural studies, we identify these as some of the issues and trends in African cultural studies. The articles included in this themed issue were selected to cross all of the earlier themes, with the concept of identity being the cement binding the papers into an overarching narrative. For example, in ‘Surviving the Future – Towards a South African Cultural Studies’, Natasha Distiller articulates the general outlines of and an argument to make a space for South African cultural studies, and issues of identity (especially race, class and language) central in her discussion. Fibian Kavulani Lukalo in ‘Outliving Generations: Youth Traversing Borders through Popular Music in Everyday Urban Life in East Africa’ sheds light on what is clearly a vibrant, emerging urban youth culture in East Africa. The Bongo Flava music described provides an excellent opportunity to examine a dynamic space where multiple forms of identity (national, regional, generational, gendered, linguistic, etc.) intersect in complex ways.

All the studies published in this volume engage the notion of ‘Africanness’ in interrogating issues of identity and the notion of ‘culture’. This is a recurring theme to which the journal Critical Arts has devoted several special issues (e.g. Wright 2002, 2003a, Williams 2000). Wright, (2003b) has argued that black people in ‘predominantly black’ countries in Africa do not self identify as black but rather become black or are assigned blackness as an identity marker in the West [for a parallel argument, see Michelle Wright (2004) on how African Americans became black]. There is a welcome conceptual continuity reflected in the fact that Awad Ibrahim and Glenn Jordan make similar points in their contributions to this themed issue. For and in the West, race is a crucial, definitive marker (e.g. Webster 1992). For the vast majority of Africans, however, it is questions of ethnicity and relationship to the ancestors that are the most crucial markers of identity (Kasoma 1996, Ododo in this issue, Jordan, in this issue). The importance of the ancestors and the assumption of overlapping social/ancestral dimensions is evident in Sunday Enessi Ododo's ‘Facekuerade: The Transformational Duality in Ebira-Ekuechi Festival Performance’. Few cultural and media studies scholars admit the perceptively real dimensions of religion in the everyday life of people in most societies and communities around the world. This lack of scholarly discussion of religion is a blind spot in much analysis deriving from cultural and media studies scholars living in industrial and post-industrial societies. Ododo's paper begins to address this lack in Western-derived (non-anthropological/theological) scholarship. Too often the blight of apartheid has been seen as operating purely as a form of racial oppression for blacks in South Africa. However, in ‘Beyond the Traditional/Modernity Dialectic: African Nationalist Subjectivities in South Africa Print and Visual Culture of the Early Twentieth Century’, Lize van Robbroeck illustrates how race and class intersected in the production of the virtually untenable position of black middle-class subjects during South Africa's apartheid era. Beyond adding nuance to accounts of the apartheid era, her essay is something of a reminder to the field of cultural studies that class matters.

Shepperson and Tomaselli (1992) in ‘Semiotics in an African Context: “Science” vs “Priest-craft”’, suggest a way of understanding African ontologies from the perspectives of African philosophers, linguists and a mathematician. Some of the papers in this issue appear to be operating in a similar vein. For example, Ali A. Abdi's article ‘Europe and African Thought Systems and Philosophies of Education: “Re-culturing” the Trans-temporal Discourses’ draws on similar African philosophical sources. A review of Kwame Nkrumah (1964), Leopold Senghor (1964), Amilcar Cabral (1971), Franz Fanon (1965), and similar influential early twentieth century African-based contributors to philosophy, suggests that the background to contemporary African philosophy is not the colonial experience, but the experience of anti-colonial resistance and liberation movements. This is the stuff of original praxis-based cultural studies. The context that legitimated the arguments of African philosophers, and validated their premises and conclusions, has not merely passed as the colonial administrators were sent packing; it dissipated as the object of liberation has been realized. A liberated society does not need a liberation movement. The philosophical point of this historical digression is that the leaders of liberation movements must reason in the mode of advocacy, they must mobilze people to act, not reflect. Crucial to the unfolding of African cultural studies (plural) will be the philosophical difficulty and rhetorical force (re)conceptualizing traditional concepts and understanding African societies as being as dynamic as are those in highly industrialized societies. As a way of reframing distinctions between oral and written cultures, a crucial part of these investigations into Africa require a related reconceptualization of the role of orality in the written philosophical and literary traditions of the West.

Masilela's (1987, 1988) distinct preference was and continues to be for the cultural studies discourse of the 1970s, when the field was engaged with producing history from below, addressing issues of class struggle and working with (and against) neo-Marxism. When offered the opportunity, he declined to review specific essays for this collection, asserting that, in general terms, he anticipated that, like much of the current work in cultural studies, the papers might engage post-modernism and he did not favour post-modernist work. In his general feedback to us, he reiterated that a viable and utilitarian African cultural studies ought to engage history (especially history from below) and be based on empirical studies and evidence, documentation and archival materials. Just as there is no one cultural studies internationally, there can never be a single African cultural studies. The majority of the papers in this collection reflect Masilela's general vision but in instances here and there (e.g. Lize van Robbroeck's reference to Foucault's notion of the regulation of the body, and the albeit post-colonial employment of the notion of hybridity by Natasha Distiller, Boulou de B'beri and Awad Ibrahim) they perhaps rub against the grain of a strict interpretation of that vision.

Masilela's position has implications for transnational cultural studies. It echoes and dovetails with various calls for a (re)turn to cultural studies as political, praxis work. These include Robert McChesney's (1996) arguments that the turn to post-modernism is rendering cultural studies apolitical and irrelevant; Hall's (1992) admonishments against theoreticism in cultural studies; Tony Bennett's (1992) call for cultural studies to become a form of policy work, Ann Gray's (2003) articulation of the importance of empirical work in general and ethnography in particular for grounding cultural studies, and our own advocacy for cultural studies praxis (Tomaselli 1998, Wright 2003c).

African cultural studies and their international reception

There are various ways in which a discourse declares its presence and evidence of the existence of African cultural studies exists in such forms as centres, programmes and conferences at institutions on the continent. Another indicator is of course publications and journals are an especially good indication of ongoing work in a field. We thought it might be useful, therefore, to point to a few examples of African-published and edited journals devoted to cultural studies or inclusive of cultural studies work. Following that, we give our impressions of the international reception of African intellectual work.

Africa Media Review (African Council for Communication Education, Nairobi, Kenya published communication studies on African topics). Three kinds of cultural studies are represented in this publication. First, were oral and indigenous communication methods. Second, after 1992 a Marxism which, while drawing in British cultural studies, attempted to reframe this approach in terms of African perspectives. Articles re-examined Freire, Cabral and Fanon in terms of post-Cold War issues, and new media technologies. Third, was participatory development research, development support communication, and action research, all of which emphasize bottom-up strategies of development and meaning-making. Issues of development are never far from useful cultural studies in Africa.

Critical Arts: a Journal for Cultural Studies started life in 1980 as an anti-apartheid vehicle through which to problematize the study of culture and media in terms of resistance. Its authors and editors were not even initially aware of the Birmingham School until some British readers and academic travellers brought this to their attention in the early 1980s. Since both Birmingham and Critical Arts worked off Marxist approaches, it is not surprising that early Critical Arts authors had developed along similar, if initially, parallel tracks. Following 1994, Critical Arts systematically expanded its interests to include the Africa, the Indian Ocean Rim, South–South and North–South relations (Tomaselli and Shepperson 2000).

Media Development (World Association for Christian Communication, London) provides short articles on Third World issues, and has provided space for key discussions on media and democracy in Africa. Many of these articles are framed within cultural studies notions of democracy, overlaid by the dimension of a Vatican II Theology, which relocates communication with people in communion in communities (Traber 1989).

Readings in African Popular Culture (Barber 1997) provides a relatively encyclopaedic compilation of particular forms of popular cultural African productivity: orality to television, music and song, vehicle slogans, theatre, and so on. This approach to cultural studies, as Barber's Introduction indicates, is increasingly borrowing from British cultural studies and its reconstitutions by authors who have published extensively in journals like Research in African Literatures, Africa, Critical Arts, and Passages.

Journal of Cultural Studies published by the African Cultural Institute, Nigeria, is firmly rooted in African contexts, but in a dialectical relationship with travelling theories as they impact, and find roots, in African conditions. The overarching concerns of authors who have published in this journal deal with those issues of a pressing and nature: ethnicity, development, political leadership, gender, literacy, the African renaissance and relationships between all of these and the evolution of African cultures and cultural studies.

Masilela (1988) acknowledges the importance of British derivations of cultural studies and the assistance they might give to establishing intellectual bridge-heads on the political terrains of South African and African histories. But intellectual references, he asserts, need to come from within Africa itself. In 1988 (in South Africa at least) these were few and far between. Later, journals like Critical Arts (South Africa) and Journal of Cultural Studies (Nigeria), amongst others, blazed an Africanizing trail amongst First and Second World publications which predominate in setting global theoretical agendas. Since its inaugural conference in 1996, the Crossroads in Cultural Studies has deliberately opened up spaces for marginalized parts of the world, including Africa. Indeed, the Crossroads conferences have included several keynote, plenary, and spotlight session presentations and some of these have later been published in journals like European Journal for Cultural Studies, International Journal of Cultural Studies, and Critical Arts (see Teer-Tomaselli and Roome 1997, Wright 1998, 2003a,) and edited collections (e.g. Tomaselli and Wright, 2007).

Theories and paradigms travel. As they travel they mutate and change, reconstitute initial emphases, and often disregard their origins. The way that cultural studies has travelled ‘to’ and ‘within’ Africa, is both similar to, and different from its trans-Atlantic and trans-Pacific mutations. When such theories do ‘arrive’, they are:

1. often unproblematically applied in unreconstituted forms to different conditions at their destinations, as Masilela (1988) has noted;

2. often appropriated by politicians and cultural commissars for party political ends, as in the case of apartheid (Muller and Tomaselli 1990);

3. sometimes used to disguise new hegemonic trajectories which simply substitute the shell of cultural studies terms for neo-fascist content, an articulation shorn of its original political project, or a political project in which personal agendas are disguised (Tomaselli 2001).

4. only occasionally noted by dominant Western cultural studies (which for argument's sake includes some approaches of Australasian cultural studies), which seems largely oblivious of developments on, in and from the African continent. Some Western scholars in and from the former colonies have taken up African work as they ‘talk back’ or ‘write back’ to the metropoles of intellectual production (see. e.g. CCCS 1986, Gilroy 1993). However, these have been the exception to the rule of Western cultural studies neglecting to take up and work with African cultural studies.

In short, cultural studies developed by African scholars, activists and cultural workers is studied in the North mainly in African studies programmes, less so in communication, and almost not at all in cultural studies itself. Despite the opening of spaces for African cultural studies, it appears that very little of the African corpus gets to inform the major international cultural studies debates. Being classified ‘Africa’, it is apparently relegated to the file marked ‘interesting: not necessarily relevant’.

To the papers

Boulou E. de B'beri's, ‘Africanicity in Black Cinema: A Conjunctural Ground for New Practices of Identity’ examines the interaction between black cultural and political identity in order to determine new conjunctural ‘practices of identity’, found in selected black films. He includes two specific paradigms of communication through which black people can articulate their identity and challenges the notions that they assert. In addition, he interrogates the concepts of hybridity and authenticity in identity-creation. His search for a sense of Africanicity is articulated through films such as Malcolm X and Beloved, as well as through major role players in the contemporary film industry.

‘Beyond the Traditional/Modernity Dialectic: African Nationalist Subjectivities in South Africa Print and Visual Culture of the Early Twentieth Century’ by Lize van Robbroeck, introduces another realm of African identity, that of the double consciousness involved in being ‘black’ and ‘European’. She explores the ambivalent subject positions manifest in the South African black middle class, by providing an analysis of the visual culture of the early twentieth century. She displays the differences between the public discourse of the black press and that of individual black artists. She gives specific reference to artist Milwa Pemba's work, as well as to certain black publications which substantiate her claims.

Awad Ibrahim in ‘The New Flâneur: Subaltern Cultural Studies, African Youth in Canada and the Semiology of In-betweenness’ contributes a grounding of identity theory through an ethnography of a specific group of African youth attending a high school in Ontario, Canada. The location of notions of hybridity within a cultural context and within relations of power, is an important corrective on essentializing discourses of identity so characteristic of ‘African thought’ As such, Ibraham puts forward a political argument regarding the renegotiations of African identities in contexts in the North. Language is understood as a performance of an in-between identity that is the result of their new context as immigrants and refugees in Canada, rather than merely examples of the kind of slang and shibboleths also used in, for instance, African societies themselves where cultural expression has also been influenced by the globalization of cultural form from the North such as rap and hip-hop. These quotations underpin the argument that these youth have ‘become Black’, where ‘Blackness becomes a code, a language, fashion, a hair-do, a bodily expression, and above all an experiental memory’. If these youth have indeed ‘become black’ in their new context in Canada, how does this affect their position in society? Do they experience discrimination on the basis of this blackness, or is it a means to solidarity with the experiences of other immigrants and refugees? How are they looked upon by other students in the school where the ethnographer ‘hung out’? How do they negotiate their position within these spaces, and how does their newly acquired ‘blackness’ provide them with agency to resist hegemonic discourses of otherness in the context of immigration into a country with its particular notions of multiculturalism? These are some of the questions with which Ibrahim grapples.

Fibian Kavulani Lukalo's ‘Outliving Generations: Youth Traversing Borders through Popular Music in Everyday Urban Life in East Africa’ showcases the emerging urban youth culture in East Africa. Through the popular Bongo Flava music, one is able to observe multiple forms of identity (national, regional, generational, gendered, linguistic, etc.) and how they intersect in complex ways. The artists such as Mr Nice and Lady JayDee, singing mainly in the Kiswahili language, construct a cultural space within their music, which draws from their African roots but is applicable to their current situations and ideologies. The music provides an interesting space of identity creation, since restrictions such as power and class are defied and the music is rather embraced across all ethnic, religious, gender, socio-economic, age and political divides.

Natasha Distiller in ‘“Surviving the Future” – Towards a South African Cultural Studies’, presents a further interrogation of identity in Africa, but looks specifically at South Africa and the difficulties encountered in assessing a contemporary South African cultural space. She gazes at the nation post-1994, but particularly at the identity with which the nation has been ‘burdened with’. This includes considering aspects such as race, class and language as well as certain constructed phrases which restrict the definition of South African cultural studies. She includes the concepts of creolization and hybridity and their attempts and short-comings in describing South African cultural practices, histories and identities.

Sunday Enessi Ododo's paper is based on analysing, theorizing and proposing an understanding of the Ekuechi festival of the Ebira Tao of Central Nigeria, offering an analysis of mask and mask-less significance in those kinds of performances, which the author handles well. Facekuerade theory contains the essentiality of the transformation duality, the fact that the culture to which Ododo is referring can see ‘godliness’ in a mask-less performance, and still see the person performing as one of their own. This is linked to the way ancestors are actually treated even away from the performances. Usually there are accompanying libations, sacrifices other rites which highlight the linkage between the ancestors and the living.

Ali A. Abdi in ‘Europe and African thought Systems and Philosophies of Education: “Re-culturing” the Trans-temporal Discourses’ is largely critical of European modes of thinking and attitudes towards Africa. He asserts that contemporary African philosophy may have been motivated by resistance to colonial and liberation efforts. It is in this line of thought that he challenges the way in which African philosophy has been and is conceived by Western philosophies as inferior. He charts the implications that have resulted from this categorization and highlights prominent debates in the field.

‘An African Presence in Europe: Portraits of Somali Elders’ by Glenn Jordan intertwines personal narrative of author and subjects with imagery relating to a diasporic history and cultural studies. He describes his project (The Somali Elders Project) as ‘a cultural-political intervention combining humanist portrait photography, collaborative ethnography and oral history’. His aim is to bring the marginalized voices, images and experiences of the Somali Elders in Wales to the fore, by relaying their stories to a wider audience. He highlights a theme, prevalent to this collection, that of the ‘African’ identity, questioning whether these men consider themselves European or African, considering they have spent most of their lives in Europe. His article is largely self-reflexive, as he considers his presence, as well as that of his camera in the project, asking questions such as, how does the subject present himself to the camera and how does he address you, the viewer?

Conclusion

In an article commissioned for the inaugural issue of the International Journal of Cultural Studies, Tomaselli (1998) wrote, ‘It is up to us in Africa and those concerned about the continent to ensure that our voices are heard, our ideas debated, and our theories engaged’. It is important that we stir the rich diversity and heritage of African scholarship into the international debates and directly address the continent's ‘fringe’ status. This theme issue of Cultural Studies is dedicated to this objective, adding to the growing body of work that includes journals, books, conferences, presentations, academic programmes and centres and empirical and conceptual research on African cultural studies. However, in terms of the project of transnational cultural studies, establishing and putting forward African cultural studies is only one part of the equation. The other side has to do with the reception of African cultural studies as it is being put forward. African cultural studies needs to be taken up both as a component of regional versions of cultural studies internationally and perhaps more importantly as contributory to the evolution of transnational cultural studies. Of course, there is always the issue of how this is done, with all the attendant possibilities and problems that readings and misreadings entail. As Ang (1998) once pointed out, at play at the cultural studies borderland ‘is a politics of (mis)communication where the transfer of meaning cannot be taken for granted’ (p. 20). Wright's (1998) caveat to the field is probably still pertinent: as Africans we can only be at home in international/transnational cultural studies when we can say ‘African cultural studies’ without non-Africans raising an eyebrow and us feeling like biting our tongue. Better yet, we can only be at home in cultural studies when non-Africans engage African cultural studies without us raising an eyebrow and wishing they would bite their tongue.