The presider, Olabode Ibironke, begins by laying out a broad range of questions on African materialities that encompasses all aspects of African ontologies of presence—everything from the politics of African visibility and invisibility to legibility and illegibility: bodies, spaces and mobility, voices and representation, semiotics, architecture and environment, textuality, and translation. The panel is concerned with blackness in the corporeal and historical sense, what Irele in The Negritude Moment calls “the-Black-existence-in-history,” but also in the cultural and dialectical sense that extends to Achille Mbembe’s notion of “The becoming Black of the World” in the Critique of Black Reason.

Oluwafunmilayo Akinpelu examines the outward mobility and (truncated) futurity of Nigerian youthful bodies in contemporary Nigerian Literature. She deploys the moment when the United Arab Emirates placed a visa ban on all citizens of Nigeria, Ghana, and 18 other African countries as incidents of expelled bodies that serve as case studies on African futurity—from students and tech bros to celebrities, slay queens, and young hustling online vendors, whose dreams of emigration to Dubai and other countries of greener grass are truncated by harsh immigration policies birthed through the influence of subtle and overt forms of racism, colorism, and ‘bad’ nationalism. She critiques the depiction of outward mobility in the literary worldbuilding and characterization of Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor while exploring the intricacies of politically botched futurities experienced by Nigerian youths.

Caroline Beard Colquhoun discusses Queer (In)Visibility in the Works of Trifonia Melibea Obono. Through a critical lens that combines queer, feminist, and postcolonial theory, she reads Obono’s novel La bastarda (2016) alongside Yo no quería ser madre (I Did Not Want to Be a Mother) (2021), a volume of anonymous queer testimonies compiled by the same author. By tracking how these narratives of queer existence and survival reject and disidentify with Fang (the dominant ethnic group) and Equatoguinean notions of sexuality, kinship, and mothering, she is able to show how Obono’s fiction and non-fiction texts not only create friction with/in prevailing national and social narratives of identity and belonging, but also how they complicate previous academic claims regarding queer identities and materiality in Africa. The voices of the queer characters and people in Obono’s texts break the silence around the subject of queerness in Equatorial Guinea, creating important referents--and resonant declarations of existence--within that country and throughout the African continent.

Elizabeth Olaoye attempts to capture the emergence of Afropolitanism as a pivotal framework for exploring the experiences of Africans navigating the complexities of globalized cultures and identities. Delving into the degrees of embodied Afropolitanism depicted in diasporic literature, particularly focusing on Chika Unigwe's collection of short stories, Better Never than Late, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Americanah, she draws on the insights of critics such as Mbembe Achilles, Olabode Ibironke, and Amatoritsero Ede, to explore how Afropolitan writers subtly encapsulate the African Diasporic experience through their characters’ embodied practices. It promises to illuminate the nuanced ways in which characters negotiate their African heritage and cosmopolitan identities within diverse cultural landscapes.

Ibironke will conclude by circling back to Mbembe’s work on Afropolitanism as an example of how the insertion of African materiality disrupts the framework of cosmopolitanism.