Area Studies: From “Global Anglophone” to Afropolitan Literature

Abstract

African Literature has gone through many phases: from its being denied a literary category to becoming Third World, Commonwealth and Postcolonial Literature respectively and to its latter categorization as a “Global Anglophone Literature” subsumed under an overarching “Area Studies” American academic quota. This essay examines these shifts between categorizations and focalizes the politics, both professional and disciplinary, that undergirds such unstable and sliding nomenclature. It proceeds to tease out, within a postcolonial framework, the Euro-American empire-building imperatives of such naming. While some of these questions are not necessarily completely new, what is unique here is that this reflection concludes by suggesting Afropolitanism as a possible alternative discourse for reading postcolonial African and African diasporic culture.