Conferência organizada no âmbito da segunda edição do Prémio Amílcar Cabral, atribuído a Sakiru Adebayo, especialista em literatura africana.

Ethical Afropolitanism:

Reading Africa’s Mobile Subjects in Helon Habila’s Travellers

Sakiru Adebayo (University of British Colombia)

This lecture examines the possibility of ethical relations between privileged and underprivileged African subjects in the West. It asks: in this age of Mediterranean crossings, at the heart of which are many forcibly displaced African, what can the Afropolitan do? In this era of the global refugee crisis in which millions of Africans are rendered stateless, does it become imperative for Afropolitans and other elite African travellers to be stakeholders in the conversation? What might the terms and conditions of engagement between the affluent Afropolitan and the abject African migrant in the Global North look like? To answer these questions, I look at the ethical dimensions of the representation of African refugees through the eye of an Afropolitan in Helon Habila’s Travellers. Put differently, with Habila’s Travellers, I dissect one Afropolitan man’s ethical journey through the abyss of the European migrant crisis at the centre of which are many involuntary African travellers. I investigate the ways in which the novel formulates and complicates un/ethical encounters between the Afropolitan and the stateless African in the diaspora. In my reading of the novel, I argue that an ethical substantiation of the concept of Afropolitanism has the potential to rescue it from its purported theoretical shallowness. I also argue that the Afropolitan project is futile if it fails to acknowledge and accommodate the presence of stateless Africans in Western metropoles. Overall, this talk is an attempt at bringing ethics into the Afropolitan discourse, it is an attempt at theorising an Afropolitan ethics of mobility.

Sobre o orador:
Sakiru Adebayo foi o vencedor do Prémio Amílcar Cabral 2022.
É Professor Auxiliar na University of British Colombia (Canadá) na área de Estudos Culturais. A sua investigação abrange a literatura africana, a nova diáspora africana, os estudos pós-coloniais, estudos negros, estudos da memória, e estudos da melancolia.
Nascido em Ijebu Igbo, uma cidade no sudoeste da Nigéria, mudou-se para Ibadan para estudar na Universidade de Ibadan, a principal universidade da Nigéria. Mais tarde, mudou-se para Joanesburgo, na África do Sul, para fazer o doutoramento na Universidade de Witwatersrand. Trabalhou como bolseiro de pós-doutoramento no Wits Institute of Social and Economic Research (WISER).

Imagem: Capa do livro Travellers, de Helon Habila.