This essay locates the concept of Afropolitanism, introduced in the mid-2000s by Achille Mbembe and Taiye Selasi, inside a longer historiography on cosmopolitanism in Africa. Used to describe the multifarious ways that Africa is enmeshed in the world, today ‘Afropolitanism’ connects Africa’s global metropolises, transnational cultures and mobile populations under a single analytic term, signifying the radical diversity that Africa possesses now and has throughout history. This essay argues that the idea of Afropolitanism has impacted theory on Africa in two ways. First, instead of regarding pluralism as a threat to state stability, Africa’s cosmopolitan cities and zones are now thought to be harbingers of a new post-racial political future; rather than supposing that states will progressively coalesce into defined nations, as per the organic analogy, ethnically heterogeneous states are increasingly upheld as ‘modern’. Second, Afropolitanism marks a radical shift from a longer history of black emancipatory thought. Contra 20th century Pan-African and Afrocentrist endeavours to create a civilization based on the ‘African Personality’, proponents of Afropolitanism instead propose a world in which there can be no centre for Africa, no cultural integrity, only networks and f lows. Following the 1980s turn to cultural history, scholars of African cities and societies have paid increasing attention to the complex ways that Africans manufacture their identities and lives, worlds and socialities. In the 1990s, a rising interest in global connections (also known as ‘the global turn’) occurred at the same time as Africa’s topography was radically transformed by the end of the Cold War, the fall of numerous state dictatorships, and the increased mobility of people and business in and out of Africa. The concept of cosmopolitanism, used by scholars to describe these changes, coalesced a number of interrelated ideas: urbanism, pluralism, globalization and a universalism similar to Immanuel Kant’s use of the term. The ‘cosmopolitan turn’, coinciding with the new wave of optimism generated by media on Africa in the early 2000s, signalled a shift in longstanding attitudes towards the diversity of people and cultures within Africa’s states. Whereas during the era of decolonization from the 1950s–70s, scholars often looked at the numerous tribes in Africa as a risk to the nation-state’s stability, today’s scholarship on cosmopolitanism advances Africa’s pluralistic societies as vanguards of potentially postracial futures. The term Afropolitanism, which now encompasses a large subset of cosmopolitan studies, was effectively invented twice in the mid-2000s. Although scholars have typically attributed the neologism to the Ghanaian novelist Taiye Selasi’s 2005 essay ‘Bye-Bye Babar’, scholarship inside South African circles saw the term circulating earlier. In a conversation between scholar Sarah Nuttall and anthropologist Mark Gevisser in 2004, for example, Gevisser remarked that Johannesburg could be called ‘an Afropolitan city... a place where you can eat fufu or Swahili curry or pap en vleis’. This use of the term, meaning a pluralism of African cultures in one geographical space, was later expanded by theorist Achille Mbembe in a 2007 essay ‘Afropolitanism’ wherein he described Afropolitanism as ‘the presence of the elsewhere in the here’, the ‘interweaving of © 2017 John Wiley & Sons Ltd worlds’ caused by the movement of Black and non-Black people in, out and throughout Africa. There could be no such thing, he argued, as African authenticity in a continent so connected physically and historically to other parts of the world. In this sense, Johannesburg was ‘the centre of Afropolitanism par excellence ... a metropolis built on ... multiple racial legacies’. Taiye Selasi’s use of the term, by contrast, was to name a generation of the diaspora whose parents had left Africa in the 1960s–70s and who had consequently grown up between several global metropolises, speaking multiple languages, engaging with both African and non-African cultures. Yet because she and Mbembe deployed a similar vocabulary to describe Afropolitanism as a new form of transnational ‘African modernity’, scholars have treated them as if they were in conversation, although this was not likely the case. Nevertheless, both figures created an image that scholars and artists have together found alternately provocative and objectionable: an African modernity that seeks to let go of an essential ‘Africanness’, to dissolve ‘Africa’ into the world. This essay argues two points: first, that the turn to cosmopolitanism initiated by scholars in the 1990s has, in African studies, reversed an important train of thought towards pluralism and the state. The organic analogy, which posited that states slowly coalesce from many multifarious elements into one nation (as built off the European model of feudalism to statehood), has turned around to uphold a state which, beginning as a homogenous germ, steadily grows more complex, heterogeneous and worldly. The result is that cosmopolitan societies are thought to be more politically sophisticated, a form of universalism believed to develop from the close elision of cultures. Second, the concept of Afropolitanism advanced by Mbembe and Selasi has been a radical break with a longer intellectual history of emancipatory politics in African studies. Pan-Africanism and Afrocentrism, two important movements in Black politics since at least the 19th century, found their power and sustenance in a racial solidarity underpinned by a determinedly non-European epistemology – a way of seeing, being and thinking through the world that was uniquely ‘African’. In its most principled form, Afrocentrism contended that a common humanity could only be created if the Other, in this case the Black or African, was so radically Other, so uncompromisingly themselves, that engaging themwouldmean surmounting seemingly unsurmountable difference. Afropolitanism, by contrast, is in Mbembe’s words, ‘the ability to recognize one’s face in that of a foreigner... to domesticate the unfamiliar’. It imagines a future where difference is so superf luous that abject difference, the Other, breaks down entirely. It is in this sense that Afropolitanism marks a radical turn in the history of Black emancipatory thought. Cosmopolitan Africa: A Historiography to 1990 In the 1990s, the study of African cosmopolitanism grew out of, and against, the legacy of the African ‘tribe’ – politically primitive, ahistorical and self-perpetuating, determinedly local. It was assumed by early anthropologists that tribes reproduced the same social configurations from generation to generation, and that by studying them, scholars could gain insight into the elementary building blocks of human society. Famed structural-functionalist A.R. RadcliffeBrown was pioneering to argue in the 1950s that a multiracial city ought to be studied as one structural system rather than separate systems conjoined by diffusion. But in general, the possibility of studying Africa’s multiethnic communities, even cities like Nairobi or Dakar, was precluded by the myopic approach of early ethnographers who surveyed what appeared to them as bounded communities, transcending both time and change. The 1940s, however, called several of these suppositions into question. For both colonial officers and anthropologists, it became increasingly impossible to ignore the effect that the 2 of 11 The Afropolitan Idea © 2017 John Wiley & Sons Ltd History Compass 15/2 2017:e12362, 10.1111/hic3.12362 colonial economy had on Africans’ social structures. Indirect rule, installed by figures such as Lord Lugard and Donald Cameron, had cleaved village from city, rural from urban and sequestered so-called tribes into ‘ethnic homelands’ whose migrations were tightly controlled by the colonial government. The effect was a veritable set of transformations in the socio-spatio relationships of kinship – or what anthropologists had called ‘social change’ and what colonial planners feared was ‘detribalization’. The multi-ethnic city was conceptualized by colonists not as estuaries of coexisting pluralism but as a domain in which ethnicity would gradually erode, imperilling the colonial project by transforming its exploited labourers into a unified class. It is only in more recent scholarship, since the 1990s, that colonial cities have been investigated as cosmopolitan spaces. Certainly, they were not universalist in any moral sense. But as nexuses for migrant labourers, imperial officers, families and immigrant diaspora, they were undeniably multiethnic, multiracial spaces where people constantly bridged colour lines to undermine the biopolitical order of colonial rule. For this reason, Mahmood Mamdani refers to civil law in cities (contrasted with customary law in villages) as a type of ‘settler cosmopolitanism’ – a set of legal strictures which were continuously retailored to maintain difference and control over people.With the rise of interest in the African city in the early 2000s, scholars have looked back on colonial cities and frontiers as areas for the study of pluralism. Yet it was not until the decolonization era that African pluralism took centre stage in scholarship, but then as a threat to state security. The independence era in Africa coincided with the outbreak of many civil conf licts, notably the BiafranWar in Nigeria, the Shifta war in Kenya and the campaign for Katanga’s secession in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It is a testament to the political-mindedness of that era’s scholars that much of their work, from the 1960s–70s, focused on the anatomy of the state. One effect was a body of theory which explored the necessity of a unified nation. Pioneering in this vein were Leo Kuper andMichael Smith’s 1969 volume Pluralism in Africa, Alvin Rabushka and Kenneth Shepsle’s Politics in Plural Societies and Crawford Young’s 1979 The

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非裔思想：非洲研究中的世界主义新观点

本文探讨了非洲都市主义的概念，该概念在2000年代中期由Achille Mbembe和Taiye Selasi提出，并纳入了关于非洲世界都市主义的较长史学中。过去常被用来描述非洲融入世界的多种方式，如今的“非洲主义”以单一的分析术语将非洲的全球大都市，跨国文化和流动人口联系在一起，这标志着非洲现在所拥有的以及贯穿整个历史的极端多样性。本文认为，非洲都市主义的思想从两个方面影响了非洲理论。首先，非洲的国际化大都市和地区不再被视为对国家稳定的威胁，而是被视为种族后政治新未来的预兆。而不是假设各州将逐步合并为确定的国家，根据有机的类比，种族异质国家越来越被认为是“现代”的。其次，非洲黑人主义标志着黑人解放思想历史悠久的根本性转变。相反，二十世纪的泛非主义者和非洲裔主义者致力于建立基于“非洲人格”的文明，非洲裔主义者则提出了一个世界，其中没有非洲的中心，没有文化的完整性，只有网络和潮流。随着1980年代转向文化历史，非洲城市和社会的学者越来越关注非洲人制造其身份，生活，世界和社会的复杂方式。在1990年代，随着冷战的结束，众多国家独裁政权的倒台以及人员和企业流动性的增加，非洲的地貌发生了根本性转变，与此同时，人们对全球联系的兴趣日益增加（也称为“全球转向”）进出非洲。学者用来描述这些变化的世界主义概念汇集了许多相互联系的思想：城市主义，多元主义，全球化和普遍主义，类似于伊曼纽尔·康德（Immanuel Kant）对该术语的使用。“世界性转变”与2000年代初媒体对非洲产生的新一波乐观情绪相吻合，标志着人们对非洲各州人民和文化多样性的长期态度发生了转变。在1950到70年代的非殖民化时代，学者们经常将非洲众多部落视为民族国家稳定的风险。当今关于世界主义的学术研究推动非洲的多元社会成为潜在的后种族未来的先锋。非洲人一语这个术语现在涵盖了世界性研究的很大一部分，在2000年代中期被有效地发明了两次。尽管学者们通常将这种新名词归因于加纳小说家泰耶·塞拉西（Taiye Selasi）在2005年发表的论文“ Bye-Bye Babar”，但南非圈子内的学者称该词较早传播。例如，在学者Sarah Nuttall与人类学家Mark Gevisser在2004年的一次对话中，Gevisser指出约翰内斯堡可以被称为“一个非洲城市……在这里您可以吃到fufu或Swahili咖喱或pap en vleis”。这个词的用法 意思是非洲文化在一个地理空间中的多元化，后来理论家阿基里·姆贝姆贝（Achille Mbembe）在2007年的论文《非洲黑人主义》中进行了扩展，他在其中将非洲黑人主义描述为“这里其他地方的存在”，“交织在一起©2017 John Wiley＆黑人和非黑人在非洲境内，外及整个非洲的迁徙造成了Sons Ltd世界。他认为，不可能有这样的事情，因为非洲的真实性在大陆和历史上与世界其他地区如此紧密地联系在一起。从这个意义上讲，约翰内斯堡是“非凡的非洲城市主义中心……建立在……多重种族遗产上的大都市”。相比之下，Taiye Selasi使用的术语是 以此来命名一个散居国外的一代，他们的父母在1960年代至70年代离开非洲，并因此在几个全球大都市之间长大，说多种语言，与非洲和非非洲文化交往。然而，由于她和姆贝姆贝使用相似的词汇来描述非洲都市主义是一种跨国的“非洲现代性”的新形式，因此学者们视他们为对话中的人们，尽管这种情况不太可能发生。然而，两个人物都创造了一种图像，学者和艺术家共同发现了这种图像具有挑衅性和令人反感：非洲的现代性试图释放一种本质上的“非洲”，从而将“非洲”溶入世界。本文论证了两点：第一，在非洲研究中，由学者在1990年代发起的向世界主义的转变，扭转了关于多元化和国家的重要思想思路。这种有机的比喻认为，国家从许多种种多样的因素中缓慢地融合为一个国家（从封建制度的欧洲模式转变为建国模式），它已经转变为维护一个国家，这个国家从同质细菌开始就稳定地变得越来越复杂，异类和世俗的。结果是，世界主义社会被认为在政治上更为复杂，这是普遍主义的一种形式，被认为是在文化的紧密淘汰下发展起来的。第二，姆贝姆贝和塞拉西提出的非洲黑人主义的概念已与非洲研究中较长的解放政治思想史彻底地打破了。泛非主义和非洲中心主义是至少自19世纪以来黑人政治中的两个重要运动，在坚定的非欧洲认识论的支持下，他们在种族团结中发现了自己的力量和维系–一种观察，存在和思考世界的方式，这是独特的“非洲”。以其最原则的形式，非洲中心主义者认为，只有当“他人”（在这种情况下为“黑人”或“非洲人”）如此极端地“他人”，以至于毫不妥协自己时，才能创造一个共同的人类，这将意味着难以克服的巨大差异。相反，用姆贝姆贝的话来说，非洲人主义是“有能力识别外国人的脸...驯养陌生人”。它想象一个未来，差异如此之大，以至于巨大的差异，另一个，完全崩溃了。从这个意义上说，非洲黑人主义标志着黑人解放思想史上的根本性转变。非洲大都市：1990年的史学研究1990年代，非洲大都市主义的研究源于非洲“部落”的遗产，该遗产在政治上是原始的，历史性的和自我延续的，并且在当地是坚决的。早期的人类学家认为，部落代代相传地复制了相同的社会形态，并且通过研究它们，学者们可以洞悉人类社会的基本组成部分。著名的结构功能主义者AR RadcliffeBrown在1950年代开创性地提出，多种族城市应该作为一个结构系统而不是通过扩散结合在一起的单独系统进行研究。但总的来说，有可能研究非洲的多种族社区，甚至包括内罗毕或达喀尔这样的城市，早期民族志学者对近代人的近视方法进行了调查，这些人调查了他们看来是有限的社区，超越了时间和变化。然而，1940年代对这些假设中的几个提出了质疑。对于殖民地官员和人类学家而言，越来越无法忽视11个非洲人的想法中的2个©2017 John Wiley＆Sons Ltd历史指南针2017年2月15日：e12362，10.1111 / hic3.12362殖民经济对非洲人的影响社会结构。由卢加德勋爵和唐纳德·卡梅隆勋爵等人建立的间接统治使乡村从城市分裂，农村从城市分裂，并将所谓的部落隔离到“种族家园”，其移民受到殖民政府的严格控制。其结果是亲属的社会-空间关系发生了一系列确实的转变，即人类学家所谓的“社会变革”，以及殖民地规划者所担心的是“无亲属关系”。殖民主义者将这个多种族的城市概念化为不是共存的河口，而是一个种族将逐渐侵蚀的领域，通过将其被剥削的工人转变为统一的阶级而破坏了殖民计划。自1990年代以来，直到最近才有学者将殖民城市作为国际大都市进行调查。当然，从任何道德角度讲，它们都不是普遍主义者。但是作为移民劳工，帝国官员，家庭和移民海外的纽带，他们无疑是多种族的，人们经常在多种族空间中架起色线，以破坏殖民统治的生物政治秩序。因此，马哈茂德·曼达尼（Mahmood Mamdani）将城市的民法（与乡村的习惯法相对照）称为“定居者世界主义”的一种–一系列法律规定，这些规定不断被零售，以保持差异和对人民的控制。在2000年代初期，人们对非洲城市产生了浓厚的兴趣，学者们将殖民地城市和边境作为研究多元化的领域进行了回顾。然而，直到非殖民化时代，非洲多元化才在学术界占据中心地位，但后来成为对国家安全的威胁。非洲的独立时代恰逢许多民间冲突爆发，尤其是在尼日利亚的比亚夫兰战争，肯尼亚的Shifta战争和加丹加在刚果民主共和国的分裂运动。这证明了那个时代学者的政治意识，他们从1960年代到70年代的大部分工作都集中在国家的解剖学上。一种效果是理论体系，探索了统一国家的必要性。利奥·库珀（Leo Kuper）和迈克尔·史密斯（Michael Smith）于1969年出版的《非洲多元化》，阿尔文·拉布什卡（Alvin Rabushka）和肯尼斯·谢普斯（Kenneth Shepsle）的《多元社会政治》和克劳福德·杨（Crawford Young）的1979