Afropolitan Projects: Redefining Blackness, Sexualities, and Culture from Houston to Accra

Crisscrossing the Atlantic between Accra and Houston, Anima Adjepong’s Afropolitan Projects: Redefining Blackness, Sexualities, and Culture from Houston to Accra offers a refreshing engagement with the quotidian practices and politics that enable a new generation of African migrants to find meaning and assert their place in the world. Adjepong’s examination of the emergent Afropolitan subjectivity through the experiences of interlocutors residing in Ghana and the United States challenges assumptions about the nature of diaspora and transnational migration within the African context. Afropolitan Projects recasts migration, its motivations, and its locales on both sides of the Atlantic and thoroughly breaks from the deep historical traumas of the Middle Passage epistemology and more contemporaneous framings that dichotomize African migrants into refugees and upwardly mobile opportunityseekers. Hence, Adjepong’s extensive ethnographic observations in Houston and Accra and critical analyses of material culture and political projects capture the centrality of aesthetics and assemblage of oftentimes contradictory ideologies of sexuality, race, and belonging. Afropolitan Projects is organized into three sections, with Chapters One and Two elaborating the experiences of Afropolitans residing in Houston, Chapters Three and Four focused on those living in Accra, and, finally, Chapters Five and Six tackling the careful negotiation of sexual, gender, race, and class politics in both settings. In Chapter One we are introduced to an ethnically diverse Ghanaian community residing in Houston. Adjepong demonstrates how their interlocutors disrupt disparaging representations of Africa and migrants by forming civic associations that showcase the vibrancy of their ethno-national heritage and alignment with neoliberal American values. Couched in a discourse that lauds diversity and middle-class valorization of work ethic, participation in civic associations adds meaning and structure to contemporary migration experiences and places Afropolitans within the urban Houston landscape. In Chapter Two, Adjepong focuses on the religious projects of the Houston-based Ghanaian community and the alignment of Ghanaian and American theological traditions. Adjepong reveals the limits of Afropolitan inclusivity through vignettes crafted from interviews and observations of outwardly secular organizations that nonetheless serve to restrict subjectivity within an overtly Christian valence, drawing attention to the exclusion of Muslims and sexual minorities. Beginning in Chapter Three, Adjepong pivots to Accra and engages the Afropolitan Ghanaians who chose to return to advance their careers, effect social change, and explore Afropolitan aesthetics in art and culture. To the Afropolitans residing in Accra, the city embodies contradictions that enable them to give form to their transnational subjectivity. Contradictions exist between universality and parochialism, progress and tradition, and international and local perspectives. However, the cosmopolitanism and relative class privilege of Afropolitan returnees hinder the fluidity of their emergence and complicate authentic relationships across class and social divides. In Chapter Four, Adjepong brings their interlocutors’ political and social activism to the fore, largely focusing on initiatives promoting sexual health and inclusivity. Through these endeavors and others, Afropolitan interlocutors envision the possibility for a post-coloniality that positions them as a cultural vanguard bridging the contradictions embedded within the Ghanaian social and political landscape. While such projects establish Afropolitan politics squarely within liberal and at times