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

By Anima Adjepong

Beyond simplistic binaries of "the dark continent" or "Africa Rising," Africans at home and abroad articulate their identities through their quotidian practices and cultural politics. Amongst the privileged classes, these articulations can be characterized as Afropolitan projects--cultural, political, and aesthetic expressions of global belonging rooted in African ideals. This ethnographic study examines the Afropolitan projects of Ghanaians living in two cosmopolitan cities: Houston, Texas, and Accra, Ghana. Anima Adjepong's focus shifts between the cities, exploring contests around national and pan-African cultural politics, race, class, sexuality, and religion. Focusing particularly on queer sexuality, Adjepong offers unique insight into the contemporary sexual politics of the Afropolitan class. The book expands and complicates existing research by providing an in-depth transnational case study that not only addresses questions of cosmopolitanism, class, and racial identity but also considers how gender and sexuality inform the racialized identities of Africans in the United States and in Ghana. Bringing an understudied cohort of class-privileged Africans to the forefront, Adjepong offers a more fully realized understanding of the diversity of African lives.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Oct 21, 2021
• ISBN: 9781469665207

Anima Adjepong

Anima Adjepong is assistant professor of women's, gender, and sexuality studies at the University of Cincinnati.

Book preview

Afropolitan Projects

Afropolitan Projects

Redefining Blackness, Sexualities, and Culture from Houston to Accra

Anima Adjepong

The University of North Carolina Press CHAPEL HILL

This book was published with the assistance of the Authors Fund of the University of North Carolina Press.

© 2021 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

Set in Merope Basic by Westchester Publishing Services

Manufactured in the United States of America

The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Adjepong, Anima, author.

Title: Afropolitan projects : redefining Blackness, sexualities, and culture from Houston to Accra / Anima Adjepong.

Description: Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press,

[2021]

| Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021009999 | ISBN 9781469665184 (cloth) | ISBN 9781469665191 (paperback) | ISBN 9781469665207 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Ghanaians—United States—Social conditions—21st century. | Ghanaians—Foreign countries—Social conditions—21st century. | Return migrants—Ghana—Social conditions—21st century. | Ghana—Social conditions—21st century.

Classification: LCC DT510.4 .A44 2021 | DDC 305.896/67—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021009999

Cover illustration: Sharon Adebisi, The Acclimatised Foreigner. Used by permission of Sharon Adebisi/ARTBYADEBISI.

Lyrics from Black Girls Glow, Humpty Dumpty, Mother of Heirs (2017), are used with permission.

For my brothers, Kobe and Yirenkyi, and in memory of our sister, Kwakyewaa

So you see, My Precious Something, all that I was saying about language is that I wish you and I could share our hopes, our fears and our fantasies, without feeling inhibited because we suspect someone is listening. As it is, we cannot write to one another, or speak across the talking cables or converse as we travel on a bus or train or anywhere, but we are sure they are listening, listening, listening.

—AMA ATA AIDOO, Our Sister Killjoy; or, Confessions of a Black-Eyed Squint

In this perspective, cultural identity is not a fixed essence at all, lying unchanged outside history and culture. It is not some universal and transcendental spirit inside us on which history has made no fundamental mark. It is not once-and-for-all. It is not a fixed origin to which we can make some final and absolute Return.… Cultural identities are the points of identification, the unstable points of identification or suture, which are made, within the discourses of history and culture. Not an essence, but a positioning. Hence, there is always a politics of identity, a politics of position, which has no absolute guarantee in an unproblematic, transcendental law of origin. … The original Africa is no longer there. It too has been transformed.

—STUART HALL, Cultural Identity and Diaspora

Our imagination is where our strength to resist lies.

—BELL HOOKS AND STUART HALL, Uncut Funk: A Contemplative Dialogue

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

CHAPTER ONE

Afropolitan Mentality in Houston

CHAPTER TWO

The Christian America Afropolitan Project

CHAPTER THREE

Accra’s Afropolitan Vibe

CHAPTER FOUR

Afropolitan Politics in Accra

CHAPTER FIVE

Afropolitan Sexual Politics

CHAPTER SIX

Afropolitan Racial Politics

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Figures

0.1 Woforo dua pa a, na yɛpia wo vi

I.1 Untitled, by Sel Kofiga 26

2.1 Untitled_41, by Eric Gyamfi 68

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to Ben Carrington, Toyin Falola, Gloria González-López, Jemima Pierre, and Nestor Rodriguez for their guidance on the dissertation that inspired this book. My dissertation research and the committee’s insights were foundational to making the arguments that unfold in the pages that follow. Likewise, in the Sociology Department at the University of Texas at Austin, Christine Williams, Sharmila Rudrappa, and Rob Crosnoe offered feedback and support along my entire PhD journey, and I am grateful for their input. Many thanks, too, to Evelyn Porter, Kevin Hsu, Julie Knisley, Valerie Weinstein, and the department’s entire administrative staff. I also received meaningful intellectual and life support from faculty and staff in the African and African Diaspora Studies Department, including Simone Browne, Caroline Faria, Joy James, Omi Jones, Xavier Livermon, and Minkah Makalani. Conversations with Abel Amado, Diane Harriford, and my colleagues in the Sociology Department at Simmons University helped me clarify some of my interventions and concepts.

I appreciate the financial support I received from the West African Research Association and the Simmons Faculty Development Fund, which allowed me to go to Accra in 2018. Funding from the Urban Ethnography Lab, the College of Liberal Arts, and the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies at UT Austin supported my time in Houston, for which I am thankful. I am also grateful to the staff and director at the Charles Phelps Taft Research Center, which provided necessary funding for the completion of the book.

On the invitations of Chinwe Oriji, Therí Pickens, Rudo Mudiwa, and Ashley Currier, I had the opportunity to present chapters and theoretical frames at the University of Virginia, Bates College, Princeton University, and the University of Cincinnati. These presentations provided valuable feedback, and I am thankful for the ongoing support of this work. Joseph Ewoodzie reached out to me to form a writing group, and I appreciate his gathering us to think together in a mutually supportive format. Drs. Kitty Girls, Shameka Powell, and Brandon Robinson read every chapter of this book at least once, providing critical feedback and encouragement. I had fun sharing drafts and hearing their generous, unfiltered reactions as the manuscript developed. It was through Joseph that I first met Lucas Church at University of North Carolina Press. I am thankful for the introduction and have enjoyed the relationship Lucas and I have built over the course of developing this book. To the team at UNC Press, including Lucas, Liz, Dylan, and Andrew, many thanks for your patience, encouragement, and careful handling of this book. My thanks also to the two anonymous reviewers who read this manuscript with attention and generosity, asking questions that pushed me to clarify concepts and manifest my arguments more clearly. Sylvia Bawa, Kemi Balogun, and Felicia Zamora agreed to a publicized preview conversation about the book, and I am so thankful for their kindness and encouragement.

A beloved transnational community has sustained me over the years. From our group chats, weekly dinners, House of Mati gatherings, long telephone conversations, and waakye beach dates, I could not have dreamt you to be more wonderful than you are. I thank you for your love, encouragement, and playful energy, and for being the best posse a person could ask for. Eric Gyamfi and Sel Kofiga (Robert Gbemu) were so kind as to allow me to use their artworks in this book. It has been wonderful developing a relationship with them over the years, and I am thankful to have them in my life. I am also thankful to Asantewa for permission to use lyrics from the Black Girls Glow debut album. In 2019, I made the decision to leave my tenure-track position as an assistant professor of sociology. During a period when ostensibly stable tenure-track jobs are rapidly disappearing only to be replaced by an ever expanding and precarious adjunct labor force, my decision to resign seemed irrational at best, at worst, hubristic. My partner Asher Keithley supported my leap outside conventional boundaries. They read each chapter of this book and cheered me on the whole way through. My deepest appreciation goes to them for their love and support.

Finally, I am grateful to the Houston-Ghanaian community, Drama Queens, Accra

[dot]

Alt, and the various individuals who welcomed me into their lives and revealed to me a world in which many worlds are possible.

Afropolitan Projects

Introduction

Last time I saw David was at the Progress in Education (PIE) fundraiser at the Sweetwater Country Club in Sugarland, Texas. It was November 2016, and David was back in Houston on a business trip from Lagos, Nigeria. During our in-depth interview in October 2015, he told me, "I’m passionate about the continent, not necessarily

[just]

Ghana. I’m passionate about our people doing well; that’s my drive. It’s the reason why I’ve even taken on a new role in my company. I’m going to be leading the

[Africa]

region for our profit-and-loss business unit. He had started to develop a potbelly since moving to Lagos, which I interpreted as a sign of his comfortable adjustment to life back home in Africa, as he put it. David is like several of the people in this book. He identified strongly as a sophisticated and urbane African who cared passionately about the continent and its people. In fact, David described himself to me as Mr. Worldwide. He had moved from Kumasi in the Ashanti Region of Ghana to Brooklyn, New York, when he was eleven years old. He attended school through university in New York State and told me he was always around diverse groups of peoples and cultures. I always tell people I’m Mr. Worldwide, you know? he said, to explain his cosmopolitan identity. He added, I don’t think David is just solely made of the fact that I’m Ghanaian. I’ve grown up around Spanish family, Italian family, Asian family, white family, so I think I have learned so much to be the person that I am today." By listing the diverse nationalities of his acquaintances, David was emphasizing his identity as a citizen of the world and his comfort around diverse peoples.

David’s sense of self as Mr. Worldwide, his middle-class position, his stated passion for Africa, and his involvement in a community of similarly situated and like-minded people reflect a cultural and identity politics that I am calling Afropolitan projects. Afropolitan projects are characterized by an expansive politics of inclusion that seeks to position actors as part of a transnational community of Africans of the world. This cultural politics engages religion; national identity; and class, sexual, and racial politics. Although positioned as inherently progressive due to their cosmopolitanism, Afropolitan projects are fraught with contradictions. For example, like several interlocutors, David articulated a sexual politics that was heteronormative until directly challenged by the idea that such heteronormativity excluded or marginalized queer people. Commenting on whether homosexuality should remain illegal in Ghana, for example, he said, People should fight for whatever rights that they believe in. But at the end of the day, whatever the law of the land is is the law of the land. In his words, David refused to explicitly share his own views on same-sex sexuality, instead ceding sovereignty to the nation and expressing support for people advocating for themselves. Afropolitan projects navigate contentious issues with such care, recognizing that not all actors are oriented toward a universally agreed upon definition of who is to be included in the community of Africans of the world.

A privileged class position and an overarching goal of African inclusion into a transnational modern world animate Afropolitan projects. This book shows how middle-class Ghanaians’ cultural politics and practices assert strong ties to a shared sense of Ghana and Africa while also expressing openness to other ways of life. I argue that the politics and cultural projects that Afropolitanism inspires emphasize and rewrite some narratives about Africa and Africans while consenting to other forms of cultural hegemony. For example, David’s claim to being Mr. Worldwide rested on his relationships with people other than Ghanaians like himself. He identified ties to Europeans (Italian and Spanish people), Asians, and white people. Yet David did not mention any other African peoples as part of his worldwide identity. By framing worldwide as exclusive of Africa, David’s assertion reproduces normative discourses about Africa as apart from the rest of the world. Noting Afropolitanism’s emphasis on relationships with non-African others demonstrates one way in which it is unlike pan-Africanism. Whereas pan-Africanists emphasize connection with other Africans both in Africa and beyond, Afropolitans assume this connection already exists and therefore expend energy insisting on a connection to the West as well. David’s identity as Mr. Worldwide offers us a cosmopolitan African—an African who, perhaps unlike other Africans, is a citizen of the world. The cultural politics with which people like David engage to articulate a position as Africans of the world constitutes Afropolitan projects. This cultural politics not only occurs in a context in which Africans have historically been marginalized as world citizens but also empowers the actions of a select group of class-privileged Africans to reshape that landscape.

An important aspect of how Afropolitan projects unfold is their everydayness: fundraising events like the one David attended to raise money for Ghanaians’ education in both the United States and Ghana, parties, panel discussions, and education campaigns. These quotidian practices, in addition to more formal material cultures, such as film, literature, music, and art, contribute to the broader cultural politics that are Afropolitan projects. Throughout this book, I show how attention to the everyday opens up new insights into how we can understand the contested terrain on which Ghanaians articulate themselves as Africans of the world. My reflections on the quotidian highlight the contests of power that occur in this realm.¹ Understanding the everyday as an arena of consent and resistance means connecting this resistance to broader issues of national identity, class, gender and sexual politics, race, and diaspora. By paying attention to the everyday, I show how the specificity of urban locations shapes the kinds of cultural politics that my interlocutors enact.

The specific focus in this book is on the cultural politics of a diverse, class-privileged group of Ghanaians who moved to the United States; who returned to Ghana after years in the United States, Western Europe, or the United Kingdom; or who have always made their lives in Ghana. My interlocutors lived in Houston, Texas, and Accra, Ghana. This transnational study makes visible how a cultural politics that articulates Africans as global citizens manifests. We can begin to see how class-privileged positionality facilitates a politics that recruits others into its pursuits of upward social mobility and a collective vision of free African futures. Afropolitan projects are the strategies that individuals and groups employ to assert that they are Africans connected to a continent, a history, a people, and a modern world. These strategies can be seen in the cultural politics that those with privileged social and cultural capital enact to tell a new story about Africans of the world. Likewise, this transnational cultural politics reveals how some Afropolitan concerns supersede place and space. Instead, communities develop new ways of being and belonging, articulating fresh connections in both expected and unlikely ways. The forthcoming journey shows how class-privileged Ghanaians are fashioning themselves as citizens of the world and, in so doing, reorienting how we think about national belonging, Blackness, sexuality, Africa, and anticolonial politics.

Class and the Afropolitan

Afropolitan articulates an African belonging to the world. In its most popular definition, Afropolitans are "the newest generation of African emigrants

[with]

American accent, European affect, African ethos."² This definition, which emphasizes an understanding of Afropolitan-as-identity, also affirms hybridity and seamless movement through different spaces. Seamless movement is part of what David was gesturing toward when he called himself Mr. Worldwide. As a politics, Afropolitanism is an aesthetic and a particular poetic of the world. It is a way of being in the world, refusing on principle any form of victim identity and instead embracing difference in a gesture of unbounded humanity.³

The Afropolitan as a rejection of the negative stereotypes and assumptions attached to African identities makes it an especially welcome concept. However, the term is not uncontested. Its popularity as a description of class-privileged Africans who reside outside the continent has posited it as an elite identity primarily concerned with aesthetics and consumerism—Africa without Africans.⁴ This critique of the term has meant that some people who might otherwise find resonance with the identity it conveys reject it as overly cumbersome and elitist. Nevertheless, the appellation still provides a foundation upon which some Africans can affirm their belonging to a world in which they strive to exist on equal footing with the global middle class.

Being part of the global middle class, or class privileged, is shorthand for the social, economic, and cultural capital that demonstrates one’s status as belonging to the world. Economic capital is best understood as money and the things that it can buy. Although money is important, the more relevant factors that promote Afropolitan status are social and cultural capital. From a sociological perspective, social and cultural capital refer to less tangible attributes, be it the people you know or the way you are able to carry your body through space to prove that you belong.⁵ The notion of Mr. Worldwide is helpful for understanding social and cultural capital. When David said he was Mr. Worldwide, he was referring to a facility of movement through diverse spaces. This reference indicates how his cultural capital—that is, his physical ease, his nice cars, his degrees, and other factors—allowed him to take up different kinds of privileged spaces. When I refer to middle-class or class-privileged Africans/Ghanaians, I am writing specifically about the kinds of social and cultural capital that allowed my interlocutors to claim an identity as Africans of the world. As we will see, colonialism heavily weighs on this claim to universal citizenship.

My focus on class provides important insights into the tensions that manifest internally for class-privileged Ghanaians enacting Afropolitan projects. By examining the complex contours of the cultural politics of this diverse class of Ghanaians, the book offers unique insight into the social organization of an African middle-class diasporic community. This work develops in the tradition of U.S. American scholars like E. Franklin Frazier, Mary Pattillo, Karyn Lacy, and Riché Barnes, who call our attention to the importance of examining the expansive makeup of Black middle classes (in the United States) as a way of understanding the distinct ways in which race and class co-constitute each other, reproduce some inequalities, and abate the negative impact of others within Black communities.⁶ In the African context, I show how Afropolitan projects, which are driven by middle-class cultural politics and social concerns, play out on a landscape in which those who occupy the middle get there through different routes and are unequally endowed with forms of capital.

Afropolitan projects are the cultural politics through which Ghanaians in Houston and Accra locate themselves as modern universal subjects. This cultural politics is an extension of what sociologist Vilna Bashi Treitler calls ethnic projects. Ethnic projects are the concerted efforts that different groups undertake in an attempt to move up the racial hierarchy in the United States.⁷ Treitler explores the cultural and political strategies in which various populations engage to attain whiteness (the top of the racial hierarchy) in the United States. Afropolitan projects engage a similar struggle for moving up a global racialized hierarchy in which Africans anchor the bottom tier of that scale. Afropolitan projects, in brief, are the diverse strategies and endeavors through which communities of Africans jostle for recognition as full citizens in a world that constructs Africa as comprising shithole countries and Africans as inherently diseased and ravaged by war.⁸ Considering Afropolitan cultural politics as a transnational ethnic project highlights the underlying racial contest that drives the various strategies embedded in efforts to become Africans of the world. As transnational migrants, Afropolitans may engage in such projects as a way to navigate their racialization as Black and African. Whether at home or somewhere in the West, Afropolitan projects allow Africans to articulate Africa as a site of modernity and futurity, on par with Europe and North America.

Those who enact Afropolitan projects aim to show that middle-class Africans rightfully belong as cosmopolitan citizens of the world. This political project is enacted through an emphasis on respectability and a clash with a colonial habitus that simultaneously affirms and rejects the idea that West is best. Sociologist Pere Ayling helps us understand that the colonial habitus is structured by race, class, and an internalization of Western superiority.⁹ The colonial condition is the residue of colonialism in a postcolonial context in which internalized Western hegemony continues to inform perception of ourselves as racialized, classed modern subjects. Colonial habitus occurs on a social field in which the rules are imposed by a dominant colonial class. This field informs the habitus and forms of economic, cultural, and social capital that colonized people will possess and value.¹⁰ By centering Africa, Afropolitan projects attempt to resist the accepted standard of West is best. But at the same time, an overemphasis on connection to the West paradoxically reproduces some of the same negative perceptions about Africans that it seeks to disrupt.

The tensions that exist around Afropolitan as an elitist African identity are reflective of the contested terrain on which Afropolitan projects occur. While certainly a cultural politics primarily driven by people with class privilege, the issues Afropolitans contend with are also materially grounded in the everyday realities of what it means to navigate the world as an African. To date, scholarly works about Afropolitans have primarily engaged with the imagined lives of these class-privileged actors through their fiction, art, folktales, music, fashion, and other aesthetic productions.¹¹ This perspective on Afropolitans has emphasized the elitism of the identity and its attendant cultural politics. Without discounting the class privilege of my interlocutors, this book deals directly with the people who engage with and produce the content and material that becomes Afropolitan. Their everyday concerns, their subjective experiences, and their material cultures all provide a more complete understanding of how class shapes Afropolitan projects.

Transnational Migration and Middle-Class Cosmopolitanism

Historically, Africans become worldwide or global citizens once they have migrated outside the continent. For example, there is a whole genre of literature that discusses a new African diaspora, comprising Africans who have moved out of the category of migrant to that of diasporan.¹² I approach diaspora by working through an existing tension of two conflicting definitions. In both instances, diaspora is a result of people’s movement across the Atlantic. By the first definition, movement produces different cultural forms and troubles modernity as an exclusively European invention.¹³ In this sense, diaspora is rooted in cultural contact and exchange, and it refuses territorial claims to Africa. This diaspora often locates Africa as a past that can never be reached again. The second definition posits a new African diaspora, which redresses Africa’s disappearance in the Black Atlantic model.¹⁴ This new African diaspora maintains territorial claims to the continent as part of a transnational politics. The nationalist orientation of the new African diaspora can paradoxically reproduce essentialist ideas about the nation by insisting on cultural essentialism. Furthermore, this definition once again positions Africa as outside the cultural politics of diaspora, while nevertheless engaging the continent as a source of culture.

From the new diaspora perspective, Africans of the world do not often live in an African country. Once Africans have left the continent to become citizens of the world, the scholarly literature and popular culture frame them as either highly educated and ambitious Black immigrants or desolate asylum seekers. This binary framing of Africans who leave the continent—as either ambition seekers or refugees—overstates the meanings of migration for this population. The normative claim is that opportunities exist elsewhere, outside Africa. Consequently, in order to achieve economic comfort and success, one must become an immigrant to create a better life. But as David’s return back home to Nigeria suggests, some Africans make moves that challenge the idea that opportunity exists solely outside the continent. Instead, the Ghanaians whose perspectives inform this book revealed a nondiscriminatory approach about where to seek the comforts of modernity and belonging. Importantly for them, Africa is a site of opportunity and possibility, as much as it is their home.

Typically, when immigrants enact a razor-sharp focus on their pursuit