Jenaba Samura: Adventures in Afropea: Black Travelogues as Literary Deconstructions of the Colonial Gaze

Lecture as part of the European Conference on African Studies – ECAS 2025: African, Afropean, Afropolitan, 25–28 June 2025 in Prague

Colonial travel accounts were used as a tool to legitimize colonial governance by profoundly influencing the European imagination of Africa. They contributed to a colonial discourse that established an essentialized depiction of Black people. Until today Black people are placed outside of Europe and the concepts Black/African and European seem to exclude each other.

This sharply contrasts with how concepts of mobility, boundaries and belonging are negotiated in travelogues by Afropean writers. For example, Caryl Phillips’ The European Tribe (1986) as well as Johnny Pitts’ Afropean. Notes from Black Europe (2020) foreground a dual perspective that critiques the marginalization of Black subjects in Europe while establishing a frame of identification that inspires a new generation of Black Europeans. They explore the duality of (not) belonging while demonstrating the possibilities of transnational identities. As Leonora Miano (2020) puts it: “To say Afropean is not to say: Senegalese French. It is not to say: Afro-French: It is to take a broader view” (ibid:48, translation).

I argue that Black travelogues appropriate the genre travel literature through centering the Black experience of Europe and using it as status quo instead of as a deviation. In addition to that I show how Black travelogues reverse key ideas of European self-imagery, for example the prominent figure of the flâneur. Thereby Black travel literature not only functions as a deconstruction of colonial discourses but also establishes a new literary geography: the Afropean space.

Literary scholar Jenaba Samura is a research team member in the project Black Narratives of Transcultural Appropriation: Constructing Afropean Worlds, Questioning European Foundations.