Amatoritsero Ede at 60: Nigerian-Canadian Poet as Global-Cultural Historian
Professor Amatoritsero Ede is known globally as an accomplished African/Black poet, and in recent years, as a research powerhouse blazing new frontiers in international Black literatures and cultures, and a highly prolific curator of both continental African and African diasporic arts and culture through his now famous e-zine, Maple Tree Literary Supplement (MTLS).[1] As a celebrated poet, Professor Ede became a household name in the global Black literary circle in the 1990s as that wonder kid, an incredibly talented writer and incomparable innovator who stunned the international literati because of his bold and almost unprecedented aesthetic experimentations in the treatment of cultural materials in his poetic compositions. Which is why many of those who gathered to celebrate him were creative writers in one form or another. But in my short treatise, I do want to reflect on what has become his most powerful role in recent years, that is, as an important cultural and intellectual historian of Black culture and arts, or more specifically, of the transnational circulation of African thought and creativity.
Cultural history as we know, attempts to make palpable a bygone past and place. It is generally concerned with beliefs and ideas, and how they inform our actions as humans in any society and culture. But what is important about the work of cultural historians is their focused attention to the interconnectedness of the past and how it relates to or impacts our apprehension of the present. Cultural historians track seemingly unremarkable everyday social trends, and signpost what is significant about them. In this regard, they point to the political-economic dimensions of culture by showing how culture as a signifying system is often both a byproduct of and a response to material social conditions. Cultural historians are often invested in tracking, documenting and showing the political and economic dimensions of culture, or what you might call the politicization of culture in everyday life. It is my view that Professor Ede has become one of the leading scholars doing this kind of work in the field of African studies.
Much of that groundbreaking work, as most speakers have already noted at the event, has been in the burgeoning area of African studies called Afropolitanism. Since 2015, Dr Ede has been one of the leading voices tracing the genealogy of this aesthetic and intellectual movement, its politics, its implications for African self-assertion, and the question of whether it constitutes a selfless artistic vehicle for expressing Africa’s prolonged history and battle with various forms of colonial violence and exploitation. In doing so, Dr Ede has become a fierce interlocutor with some of the most prominent thinkers in African philosophy and literary history such as Achille Mbembe, Simon Gikandi, Paul Gilroy, Anthony Appiah, Toyin Falola, Pius Adesanmi, Akin Adeokan, and Chelozona Eze. These are very powerful voices shaping the contemporary discourses and debates in African studies in general, and in African literary and cultural studies particularly. It is stunning how Dr Ede has challenged, refined, or totally reconstituted some of their canonical ideas. First, he has helped undrape the fuzziness of Afropolitanism both as a conceptual or discursive tool and as an aesthetic or cultural movement, noting that the adjective is in fact “a shorthand for ‘African and cosmopolitan,’ cosmopolitanism, being a macrocosm of transculturation, borderlessness, bi-or multi-ethnicity, bilingualism, near-nomadic and rhizomatic existence, urbanity and expansive worldliness, which the substantive, Afropolitanism, contemplates philosophically and critically.”[2]
But Professor Ede makes a crucial point that there’s nothing new about the Afropolitan. In fact. there’s been a long history of Africans circulating in transnational spaces, whether by force or as free global citizens. Apart from the earliest Afropolitans who interacted with Portuguese traders in the 15th-Century and diasporic black subjects extracted forcibly from the continent as slaves, there’s also an early wave of writers and scholars such as Olaudah Equiano, Phillis Wheatley, James Waldon, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, etc., who bore witness to the horrors of what it means to be black in an increasingly transnational world. Professor Ede’s point, which is really crucial, is that “the closer an African is in both space and time to the historical occurrence of metropolitan slavery, the less empowered it is.”[3] So, in tracking the genealogies of Afropolitanism as a new imaginative and cultural phenomenon, he not only unpacks what he calls the “cultural-materialist” and “phenomenological” dimensions of this new artistic/cultural and intellectual movement, he points to how it serves as a generational articulation of newfound power, especially one that seeks to distance itself from an earlier pessimism or fatalism expressed by Pan-Africanism.
Although Afropolitanism has been a very powerful and highly successful identitarian, intellectual, and transnational aesthetic movement in the past 20-years or so, Professor Ede has consistently warned that the movement enfolds a dangerous politics that draws, feeds, and invariably builds on the crass individualism and selfishness associated with transnationalism and neoliberal globalization. Intellectual and imaginative trends are often both a response to and a reflection of historical moments. So, for those of us in literary and cultural studies or the cultural sciences, for example, we see modernism as an expression of the enlightenment ethos or values associated with European modernity from the 17th-Centruy onwards: empire literature as an aesthetic encapsulation of the ideals of European imperialism; postmodernism as an aesthetic response to the fractures and uncertainties of postmodernity; and postcolonialism as an intellectual and imaginative reaction to the exclusionary politics of postcoloniality. By focusing and excavating the socio-material conditions that gave vent to Afropolitanism, Professor Ede has demonstrated eloquently how “Afropolitanism is…an ideological condition of cultural production occasioned by metropolitan hierarchies and creating social hierarchies and class formations of its own.”[4]
Afropolitans are highly successful Africans who no longer want to be perceived as just Africans, that is, they no longer want to embrace the cultural baggage that identity carries in the global social imagination. This politics of distantiation, of course, has to do with the powerful myth and rhetoric of global citizenship associated with cosmopolitanism. As a cultural historian, Professor Ede cautions that this isolationist politics (or politics of differentiation) is a naïve strategic move by the so-called Afropolitans that seeks to overtake history and locate oneself in a purified present that is disconnected from what is clearly a brutal past loaded with stunning evidence of human rights violations, the immiseration of Black lives, and the exploitation of their natural resources. His flawless assertion, then, has been that the promise of Afropolitanism as a form of redemptive cultural politics “can only be fulfilled with respect to lived experience if its two strands (that is, the cultural phenomenon and its political effects) meet as nuanced complements of an ideologically conscious and sophisticated social agency.”[5] His crucial intervention as a cultural historian in this discursive field is that Afropolitanism has great potential, only if it draws on its newfound agency to address the relentless colonial assaults being directed as black personhood in the continent and on the international arena. My reading of his position regarding Afropolitanism is that an Afropolitan politics obsessed with the ephemeral successes of the moment, which seeks to obviate itself from the crude realities enveloping and shaping the lives of ordinary people in Africa and in the black diaspora (including indigenous peoples), and ignores the lingering power of the past on the present, is bound to fail in the long run, even if it thrives momentarily and benefits a small cohort of empowered Africans leading resplendent transnational lives.
His other major intervention has been in locating Afropolitan literature as world literature. Now, the ambiguities and polysemy of the meanings in Goethe’s uses of the term ‘world literature’ has also led to uncertainties about its precise meaning. What is remarkable about the ambiguity of Goethe’s use of the term is that his idea of Weltliteratur emerged in a period of intense nationalism. In Germany, as in Europe and later in the Americas, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries witnessed the most aggressive effort in writing national literary histories. The process of political nation-building and consolidation going on in Europe, especially driven by the doctrines of romanticism, saw each nation state striving to ground its national legitimacy in some unique literary antecedents. The main criticism against the idea of world literature is that, despite its good intensions, it was, at least until about the 1960s, a Eurocentric enterprise. For Goethe, also attracted to Chinese literature, and many of his apologists, world literature simply meant European literature. Fritz Strich, in Goethe and World Literature (1949), published way before the term Eurocentrism was coined, argued that “in present-day speech practically no distinction is made between world literature and European literature—and this is a serious error” (16). He argued that for Goethe, “World literature is, to start with, European literature.” World literature was seen as promoting largely Anglo-American, white, male, and middle-class identity in mid-century America. It was this Eurocentrism in world literature that led to a radical transformation of the meaning of the term from about the 1960s onwards, especially in the context of the cultural revolutions happening immediately after the Second World War. In its current usage, World Literature is linked to transnationalism. According to Sarah Lawall (1994), “World literature is a list of works from around the globe that represent, in some indefinable manner, the essential experience of human beings in different cultures.”[6] For David Damrosch (2003), “A work only has an effective life as world literature whenever, and wherever, it is actively present within a literary system beyond that of its original culture.”[7] Following from this conception of world literature, professor Ede notes that when modern African literature emerged in the late-1950s, it entered the global cultural world of letters as commonwealth world literatures.
The key distinction Professor Ede makes between postcolonial African literature and its Afropolitan iteration is that the “new African writing considered to be Afropolitan does not engage itself with the historical effects of colonialism on the continent.” He observes that “While plot, theme, and narration might engage the existential struggles of characters in a cultural materialist manner, the larger colonialist ontology behind these are never focalized; they are eclipsed in favor of an immediate, text-bound, rather than an historical verisimilitude.”[8] Phenh Cheah has made the very crucial point that what is central in postcolonial world literatures, especially as an interventionist imaginative endeavor, is the fact that it documents the world and bears witness to the pain and suffering of marginalized groups precisely because it seeks to change that world.[9] If world literature is a genre that serves as a testimonial to the experiences and struggles of people in other cultures, especially outside of the cozy bubbles of Euro-American life, what it aims to do is to remake that world, to change or re-world it from one of colonial hierarchies and the extreme exclusions propagated and fostered by neoliberal globalization, to an egalitarian global commons marked by both political-economic and cultural equity. Thus, Professor Ede’s major contribution as a cultural historian has been the view that “an Afropolitan literary futurism—which corrupts the ontological ‘worlding’ potential of Afropolitan writing as world literature due to a lack of an ideological commitment to the African continent”[10] is what raises queries about its label as world literature. Given the determination of some of the new generation of African writers to distance themselves from the continent and identify more with a global metropolis and the cultural or ethnic deracination associated with it, Professor Ede asks serious questions about the socio-material import of this genre of new African literature or writing in an international literary commons where ‘world literature’ is concerned with unmaking eurocentrism.
But Professor Ede’s acerbic critique of Afropolitanism has not blinded him from seeing its great potential as a tool for fostering Pan-Africanist poetics and politics. In fact, only recently, in an insightful essay published in Interventions: Journal of Postcolonial Literature, the prestigious journal of Anglophone world literatures, he made a forceful case for how Afropolitan literatures has and can become a crucial site for resisting what the he calls the “disciplinary onomastics” of the Western academy. Most scholars of African literatures are aware of the marginal position assigned to African letters within the broader field of global literatures, at least in its early years. In fact, African literature wasn’t even considered a legitimate form of global literary expression. Both Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka have recounted anecdotes of various instances where the very idea of African literature was either ridiculed or questioned in Western academic institutions in the early 1970s.[11] Since then, African literature as a global genre as been labelled and inserted in broader literary categories such as Third World Literature, Commonwealth Literature, and in recent years, as a sub-genre of Postcolonial Literatures, which is itself a small field within what is known as Area Studies” in in the Euro-American academy. Professor Ede’s first line of argument is that “the myriad nomenclatures deployed to describe Other literatures are meant to restrict them and maintain the power imbalance in North/South cultural, socio-economic, historical and contemporary geopolitical relationships.”[12] His submission, however, is that Afropolitan literature as a global genre provides an opportunity to bypass or subvert the postcolonial policing of African literatures by global metropolitan literary and cultural establishments. Rather than see it as an opportunity to stage global stature and newfound power by a small cohort of African diasporic writers, he contends that it could serve as a powerful “natural surpassing of a perennial Postcolonial Literatures rubric and an alternative to the emerging Global Anglophone paradigm.”[13] While being apprehensive of the existential politics of its purveyors, Professor Ede in the openness and balance that mark his scholarship, has hinted at the ways in which Afropolitanism might draw on its global cultural and symbolic capital to assert and defend Africa’s cultural independence and imaginative integrity.
Trained and thoroughly grounded in Euro-American theory and artistic movements (especially German philosophy), yet, stubbornly tethered to his African cultural roots, both his artistic and scholarly works, whether poetry, screen or stage plays, or short fiction, or academic essays, bear the marks of a globetrotter who has ingeniously integrated the established cannons of the Western literary imagination with his own Afropolitan poetics as an Africanist. While his scholarship focuses on the politico-aesthetic dimensions of Afropolitanism as an international cultural and philosophical movement, his own poetic oeuvre is emblematic of the new artistic and cultural movement he so masterfully tracks and tackles in his scholarship. His three poetry collections demonstrate a delicate balance between the polemical engagement with postcolonial terror and the unconscionable cruelty associated with neoliberal globalization, on the one hand, and the stubborn commitment to artistic form, on the other. It is this subtle equilibrium between the commitment to form and politics in his poetics that puts Professor Ede amongst the small and highly revered pantheons of Africa’s contemporary men and women of letters. The unique interdisciplinary nature of his research work as a scholar, and his poetics as writer, are the key elements that mark him out as a highly respected and sought-after voice in Global Black Studies.
Dr Paul Ugor is a Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. This short essay was originally presented at a festschrift in honor of Dr Amatoritsero Ede, who celebrated his 60th Birthday on April 29th, 2023. I am really pleased to have been part of a small and intimate group of friends and colleagues from all over the world who gathered to celebrate your life and creative and scholarly accomplishments. For those of us that are very close to Dr Ede, we know that his life story has been an incredible journey, almost a saga, beginning with extreme and insufferable adversity to implausible global success!
Endnotes
[1] MTLS: https://www.mtls.ca/issue25.
[2] Amatoritsero Ede. “Afropolitan Genealogies.” African Diaspora 11.1-2 (2019). Pp. 37.
[3] Ibid, Pp. 38.
[4] Amatoritsero Ede. “The Politics of Afropolitanism.” Journal of African Cultural Studies. Special Issue on Afropolitanism. 28.1 (Jan 2016). Pp. 89.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Sarah Lawall. “Introduction.” Reading World Literature Theory, History, Practice, 1994. Pp. 01.
[7] David Damrosch, What is World Literature? 2004. Pp. 04.
[8] Amatoritsero Ede. “How Afropolitanism Unworlds the African World.” Afropolitan Literature as World Literature. James Hoddap ed. Bloomsbury, 2020. Pp. 104
[9] Cheah, Pheng. What is a World? On postcolonial Literature as World Literature (2016)
[10] Ibid.
[11] See Chinua Achebe’s “An Image of Africa” (1976) and Wole Soyinka’s Preface in his Book, Myth, Literature ad the African World (1978).
[12] Amatoritsero Ede. “Area Studies: From ‘Global Anglophone’ to Afropolitan Literature.”
Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Fall 2022. Pp. 02.
[13] Amatoritsero Ede, “Area Studies,” Pp. 18.
