The Afropolitan Flâneur in Literature

This timely study engages in the Afropolitan debate via the streets of the literary city. It first provides a historical and theoretical framework to illustrate how the literary flâneur—an aimless wanderer of the city—migrated from Europe to Africa and the diaspora, and how this figure is to be understood in relation to current considerations of Afropolitanism.

The literary analysis focuses on texts set in three cities in Africa (Johannesburg, Cape Town, and Lagos), as well as three global north cities (New York, Paris, and London), considered through the eyes of various types of Afropolitan flâneur. By problematising the binaries of local/global, national/transnational, black/white, and slum/paradise, this book addresses issues of belonging or not belonging, and gestures towards new ways of understanding what it means to be an African in the world today.