NOVEMBER 14, 2019
2- 3.15 PM, ROOM B1
2- 3.15 PM, ROOM B1
Birgit Neumann
Heinrich-Heine University Düsseldorf
Affective Remembering in the Afropolitan Novel – Uneasy Cosmopolitanisms
Heinrich-Heine University Düsseldorf
Affective Remembering in the Afropolitan Novel – Uneasy Cosmopolitanisms
In her influential essay “Bye-Bye Babar” published in the LIP magazine in 2005, Taiye Selasi describes a new generation of twenty-first-century African emigrants. These hip and “beautiful, brown-skinned people” (Selasi 2005, n.pag), the so-called Afropolitans, are no longer defined by the legacies of transatlantic slavery or other forms of violence. They do not leave Africa behind to escape poverty and oppression in the postcolonial nation-state. Rather, they embrace the opportunities offered by a globalized world, readily mobilizing their cultural hybridity to secure individual success and to celebrate a genuinely “African ethos” in the world.
But what if these neoliberal dreams do not come true and visions of promising opportunities are overshadowed by memories of lost homelands and an ensuing sense of alienation? As a matter of fact, recent Afropolitan novels are marked by a peculiar tension between the celebratory hope for a better future and disaffected memories of a haunted past. In a wide range of contemporary fiction from the African diaspora, acts of remembering no longer materialize in strong emotional scenarios but in affective frictions, which indicate the limits of memory in bridging the gaps between now and then, here and there. In so doing, novels such as Teju Cole’s Open City, NoViolent Bulawayo’s We Need New Names and Chris Abani’s The Virgin of the Flames (2007) undo a central premise of migrant fiction, namely “the expectation of a significant emotional experience” (Vermeulen 278) that invites readers into emphatic character identification.
What I therefore seek to describe in my paper are affective memories in recent literatures of migration, memories that fail to congeal into a meaningful narrative and do not feed into a sense of stabilizing interiority. Whereas emotions can typically be codified, classified, and named, affect is best understood as a potent yet underdetermined intensity (Massumi 24-25; Vermeulen 7) that “passes through but also beyond personal feelings” (Terada 110). Opening subjects to possible relations and multilayered entanglements with various – human and nonhuman – agencies, affect displaces the identarian mandate of mnemonic narratives. As affective memory brings in a tinge of the unexpected and latent, it gives rise to unpredictable feedback loops and temporal spiraling. As such, it forcefully disrupts the tripartite division between past, present and future to evoke the ghostly presence of the past. In my talk, I will show how affective memory in recent Afropolitian novels connects to migration and an uneasy cosmopolitanism, which operates as a critique of neoliberal celebrations of mobility.
But what if these neoliberal dreams do not come true and visions of promising opportunities are overshadowed by memories of lost homelands and an ensuing sense of alienation? As a matter of fact, recent Afropolitan novels are marked by a peculiar tension between the celebratory hope for a better future and disaffected memories of a haunted past. In a wide range of contemporary fiction from the African diaspora, acts of remembering no longer materialize in strong emotional scenarios but in affective frictions, which indicate the limits of memory in bridging the gaps between now and then, here and there. In so doing, novels such as Teju Cole’s Open City, NoViolent Bulawayo’s We Need New Names and Chris Abani’s The Virgin of the Flames (2007) undo a central premise of migrant fiction, namely “the expectation of a significant emotional experience” (Vermeulen 278) that invites readers into emphatic character identification.
What I therefore seek to describe in my paper are affective memories in recent literatures of migration, memories that fail to congeal into a meaningful narrative and do not feed into a sense of stabilizing interiority. Whereas emotions can typically be codified, classified, and named, affect is best understood as a potent yet underdetermined intensity (Massumi 24-25; Vermeulen 7) that “passes through but also beyond personal feelings” (Terada 110). Opening subjects to possible relations and multilayered entanglements with various – human and nonhuman – agencies, affect displaces the identarian mandate of mnemonic narratives. As affective memory brings in a tinge of the unexpected and latent, it gives rise to unpredictable feedback loops and temporal spiraling. As such, it forcefully disrupts the tripartite division between past, present and future to evoke the ghostly presence of the past. In my talk, I will show how affective memory in recent Afropolitian novels connects to migration and an uneasy cosmopolitanism, which operates as a critique of neoliberal celebrations of mobility.
Birgit Neumann is Full Professor and Chair of Anglophone Literature an Translation Studies at Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf (Germany). Her research focuses on world literatures, postcolonial studies, memory studies and intermediality. She has published monographs on memory in Canadian novels (2005) and on xenophobia in 18th-century British literature (2009). She has recently co-edited special issues and volumes on Anglophone World Literatures (2017), Ecocriticism in Anglophone Literatures (2017), Global Perspectives on European Literary Histories (with César Dominguez, 2018) and on New Approaches to the Anglophone Novel (with Sibylle Baumbach, 2019). A monograph (co-authored with Gabriele Rippl) on ekphrasis in postcolonial literatures is forthcoming from Routledge.