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

Product Description
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.\nReview
The increased mobility and interconnectedness of Africans and Diasporans begs greater analysis, and Anima Adjepong's in-depth scholarship captures the nuance and the complexity in the internal and external relationships Afropolitans have with host and home cultures and communities.--Msia Kibona Clark, Howard University\nWritten in beautiful narrative prose, this book brilliantly uses rich and captivating metaphors (e.g., Wakanda and wahala) to discuss the paradoxes of nation-making, space-making, and identity discourses in transnational postcolonial sites. Within an expansive queer methodology, including stories, art, and participant observation, the book uses excellent sociological analysis to historicize and problematize the mundane everydayness of Afropolitan worlds in ways that highlight ongoing erasures (intentional or otherwise) of the wahala non-Afropolitan others in this Wakandan era of Africa Rising.--Sylvia Bawa, York University\nWith a keen eye for detail and cogent multilayered analysis, Dr. Adjepong expertly weaves together a focus on class, religion, gender, sexuality, race, and nation at the transnational crossways linking Accra and Houston.
Afropolitan Projects critically interrogates both the promises and pitfalls produced on the ground through the contours of lived experiences and vibrant forms of material culture alongside the structural realities and political possibilities they engender. This book has much to offer in rethinking analytics of diaspora, postcoloniality, and belonging in Africa and the world.--Kemi Balogun, University of Oregon\nReview
With a keen eye for detail and cogent multilayered analysis, Dr. Adjepong expertly weaves together a focus on class, religion, gender, sexuality, race, and nation at the transnational crossways linking Accra and Houston.
Afropolitan Projects critically interrogates both the promises and pitfalls produced on the ground through the contours of lived experiences and vibrant forms of material culture alongside the structural realities and political possibilities they engender. This book has much to offer in rethinking analytics of diaspora, postcoloniality, and belonging in Africa and the world.--Kemi Balogun, University of Oregon\nAbout the Author
Anima Adjepong is assistant professor of women's, gender, and sexuality studies at the University of Cincinnati.