Afropean Peripheries: Mapping Temporal and Spatial Liminalities

Recent publications on Black Europe reveal a productive tension at the heart of the concept of Afropea: It spans from an utopian vision of the future to a past that still awaits full recovery.

In 2019, writer and photographer Johny Pitts published his travelogue Afropean. Notes from Black Europe in which he captures Afropea as an existing place and a lived experience. He finds precursors in chroniclers of Afropea avant la lettre such as Audre Lorde, James Baldwin, and Caryl Phillips. In 2020, Léonora Miano, one of Afropea’s most prominent theorists, published Afropea, une utopie post-occidentale et post-raciste, in which she positions Black European identity as a distinct experience. That same year, Olivette Otele published African Europeans: An Untold History, which recounts the lives of African Europeans such as Alexander Pushkin. She thus sheds light on a past whose bearing on European history has all too often been obscured or denied.

This workshop builds on these past, present, and future negotiations of Afropea and invites discussion of its temporal and spatial dimensions, including its geographical and ideological limitations. We are interested in challenging the notion of “peripheral Afropeanness,” in which Blackness is precariously positioned as merely in proximity to the perceived ‘borders of Europe,’ and, by extension, in which the presence of Black Europeans is still met with surprise rather than recognized as deeply embedded in Europe. Here, we explore the temporalities, spatialities, mobilities, and identities that come into relief when centering Blackness in Europe. We ask: How does the reality of Black life in Europe unfold in daily negotiations of time and place? How do these negotiations forge liminal spaces that simultaneously prefigure Afropean futures and reckon with a colonial-racial past? And what imaginations of Afropea can be drawn from disciplines such as literary and cultural studies, anthropology, history, and the arts?

The workshop is part of the ERC-funded project Black Narratives of Transcultural Appropriation: Constructing Afropean Worlds, Questioning European Foundations.