An Afropolitan literary aesthetics? Afropolitan style and tropes in recent diasporic African fiction

This article discusses what the authors call an emerging Afropolitan aesthetics. Through an exploration of recurring stylistic features, the article focuses particularly on the trope of a mobility-induced anxiety that entwines place and self. The ontological and affective troping of return and of self-understanding and the contemporary signification of Africa as a complex place of relocation and reconnection are explored in discussions of literary characters in Taiye Selasi’s Ghana Must Go (2013), Yvonne Owuor’s Dust (2014), Sefi Atta’s A Bit of Difference (2013) and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah (2013).