Since Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness¹ and Caryl Phillips’s The Atlantic Sound,² several scholars have explored new directions in the field of African Anglophone literature and culture from a variety of perspectives.³ Urging us to think beyond the frames of colonial histories, combinations like “Afro-Europe”⁴ or “African Europeans”⁵ in scholarly discourse on Africa and Africans remind us that Black Europe is not a neat and clean category. Rather, these combinations invite us to look at both African and European histories as ambivalent and entangled categories that require a new approach and perspective in the age of global movement and modernity. Both geographical signifiers are less self-evident. Not only are Europe and Africa descriptors, but they are also constructs that often depend on each other and evoke certain imaginaries and ideas when encountered together. Moreover, due to the experience of forced migration during the transatlantic slave trade which scattered Africans on distant continents, the very term ‘African’ is somewhat problematic and contested: descendants of Africans who were transported to the Caribbean or to the countries of Latin America do not necessarily call themselves Africans. The term Black is preferred to African in some contexts, just as the descriptor “African diaspora” rather than just “African” is used for second and third generation Africans living outside of the continent. The term “Afropean”⁶ has also increasingly gained currency in the last years. These seemingly neat descriptors, seeking to outline specific experiences, often become more difficult to apply when confronted with the complex relations and experiences that actually occur across Europe and Africa. By virtue of these diverse and plural historical entanglements across continents, African Anglophone literature and media are a rich terrain of cultural inquiry on which this special issue focuses, inviting ongoing reflection on these concepts.

Anglophone literary and cultural studies have long shown an interest in the legacies of the British Empire, which is why relations between Africa and Britain tend to take a prominent place in the field. Yet, more global elements enter these texts as well. Indeed, a significant number of prominent ‘African’ or ‘Black’ writers in Britain, such as Abdulrazak Gurnah, David Dabydeen, Buchi Emecheta, Andrea Levy, Jackie Kay, or Mike Phillips, address history, race, and identity from a global standpoint, engaging fiction as an alternative archive, a repository of history in progress, a vehicle of “post-colonial transformations,”⁷ and a mode of re-membering against forgetting. Thus, these texts shed new light on the fraught relationship between Europe and Africa on the one hand and historical crisscrossing between the two continents, which are often erased or ignored in historical record, on the other. A cursory glance at 20th and 21st century writing unfolds a vast array of themes in literature set in multiple geographical, cultural, and temporal landscapes from a transcultural vantage point: Both British Nigerian writer Chibundu Onuzo’s novel Sankofa,⁸ set in Britain and Bamana (based on Ghana), and British Nigerian author Sefi Atta’s A Bit of Difference,⁹ set in Britian and Nigeria, deal with travelling histories and identities, as the fictional female characters go back to Africa to retrace their seemingly forgotten African connections and rediscover themselves. British Guyanese writer Beryl Gilroy’s Black Teacher¹⁰ and British Nigerian author Diran Adebayo Some Kind of Black¹¹ deeply engage with the notion of blackness and race relations in post-war Britain that tends to exclude ‘the other’ on the basis of colour difference. However, there are also texts that focus on cross-European movements undertaken by ‘Afropean’ protagonists: British Nigerian author Bernadine Evaristo’s experimental road novel Soul Tourists¹² deals with the intertwinement of African and European histories just like British Sudanese writer Jamal Mahjoub’s Travelling with Djinns,¹³ which depicts European history as plural and diverse, as opposed to a ‘pure’ notion of Europe.

Sharing an interest in concerns over home and belonging, some narratives about Africa in Europe and vice versa are explicitly triangulated via the Caribbean, with legacies of the slave trade lingering to this day. British-Afro Barbadian and Nigerian writer Labi Siffre’s novel Nigger¹⁴ and British Greek Cypriot and Caribbean poet Dean Atta’s collection I Am Nobody’s Nigger¹⁵ concentrate on the crisis of identity in Britain that aims at a more homogenised identity and thus excludes African-born British citizens as well as African immigrants. In his collection Extravagant Strangers: A Literature of Belonging,¹⁶ Caryl Phillips underlines how British literature has for at least two and a half centuries been decisively shaped by ‘extravagant strangers’ from all over the world. He also points out how Black British or African writers in Britain “emerged in the wake of the slave trade” and are “[b]est exemplified by Olaudah Equiano.”¹⁷ They were “succeeded by a group of writers who were born in British colonies.”¹⁸ These developments crystallise the fact that “Britain has been forged in the crucible of fusion – of hybridity.”¹⁹ Indeed, a constant search for belonging to escape a sense of displacement presents a major preoccupation in the works of these writers, as Phillips observes.²⁰

This engagement with a sense of belonging in African Anglophone writing assumes another dimension in refugee literature, where refugees from Africa strive to seek safety and security in a hostile space. Several writers have not only captured and documented the predicaments of African refugees, as in Helon Habila’s novel Travellers²¹ about six African figures of mobility in Europe whom Habila simply calls “travellers”, but also refugee children as in British Caribbean writer Benjamin Zephaniah’s youth novel Refugee Boy,²² where the eponymous Ethiopian refugee boy, Alem, is abandoned by his parents so that he can settle in Britain safely, and British Somali author Nadifa Mohamed’s novel Black Mamba Boy,²³ where once again the refugee boy, Jama, journeys from war-torn Eritrea to Sudan, Egypt, Palestine, and finally to Britain in search of his father. However, literature also imagines the reversal of current refugee mobilities: Oana Aristide’s post-apocalyptic Under the Blue²⁴ inverts the dominant narrative, casting three British protagonists as refugees who are fleeing from destruction in Europe and seek safety in Africa. All these literary works break new grounds in presenting and imagining transcultural histories as African and Europeans inhabit the “interstices”²⁵ of culture in the age of global modernity and mobility, which unfolds cultural reconfigurations across borders.

In the realm of film, television, and media more generally, transcultural histories are uniquely captured on screen and highlight the transnational connections that have informed the continents’ relationship for centuries. The period drama Belle,²⁶ directed by Amma Asante, charts Euro-African connections resulting from the transatlantic slave trade, once again triangulating Europe’s and Africa’s relationship via the Caribbean. The more recent documentary We Were Here: The Untold History of Black Africans in Renaissance Europe²⁷ by Italian-Ghanaian-U.S. director Fred Kudjo Kuwornu calls attention to the early Black presence in Europe as well, using the medium of film to stage a transmedial discourse with the arts, including a close interrogation of the representation and imagination of Afropeans in Renaissance painting and visual arts. The latter film, in particular, takes into account multiple European nation-states and therefore articulates a genuinely transcontinental imaginary of interconnectedness.

Mobility and migration play a pivotal role in numerous contemporary films about African-European relations, such as the road movie Roads²⁸ directed by Sebastian Schipper that follows the joint journey of two young men: Congolese William who is searching for his brother and British Gyllen who is running away from his family. Together, they set out from Morocco to France, crossing borders and creating new entanglements. Notable for its portrayal of African-European connections is Warda Mohamed’s short film MUNA,²⁹ which follows the story of the eponymous British-Somali teenager living in England about to go on a school trip, an example of everyday mobility beyond migration.³⁰ When her grandfather passes away in Somalia, she has to come to terms with this loss and unexpectedly finds connections that stretch across continental borders. Ghanaian-British artist and writer John Akomfrah’s audiovisual works, such as Vertigo Sea,³¹ also focus on themes of mobility, displacement, and colonial legacies, offering multiple ways of presenting and addressing Africa today.³²

The idea of Afropeanism is taken up explicitly in Delali Amegah’s photography exhibition entitled “AFROPEAN GIRL” in Berlin in July 2024. It was marketed as an “exploration of visual storytelling as a tool of liberation for Black women in the diaspora”³³ and uses photography to claim space for experiences and voices of Afropeans. Other important exhibitions interrogating the relationship between Europe and Africa include the Tate Modern’s “A World in Common: Contemporary African Photography” (2023–2024), the Deutsches Historisches Museum’s “Deutscher Kolonialismus / German Colonialism” (2016–2017) and the exhibition that has travelled across European and American museums entitled “Making Africa: A Continent of Contemporary Design” (2015–2019). The practice of exhibiting African-European connections is also interrogated and negotiated in literary texts, such as Ayim’s The God Child.³⁴ Hence, Afro-European connections have taken many forms in literature, films, and art, like in many other media.

Arguably, since Johny Pitts wrote the travelogue Afropean: Notes from Black Europe,³⁵ the discourse of Africa in relation to ‘postcolonial’ Europe has entered a new phase. This new phase does not merely dwell on Africa versus Europe. Instead, it underscores the dynamics of “overlapping territories, intertwined histories,”³⁶ where locations are a terrain of “histoire croisée” – ‘entangled histories’ in the plural.³⁷ In other words, this phase demonstrates how African and European histories intersect and intermingle and how Africa is not Europe’s permanent or invisible ‘Other,’ but that Africans as the New Europeans are as much Africans as Europeans. For these New Europeans, whom Pitts calls ‘Afropeans,’ the notions of identity and belonging, home and homeland are porous and blurry, since they tend to navigate between Africa and Europe literally and metaphorically, inhabiting transcultural spaces and life-worlds.³⁸ While there seems to be a new quality to these transcontinental experiences, too much emphasis on ‘newness,’ however, also risks obscuring longer histories of entanglement between Africa and Europe, which this special issue also takes into account.

Considering these developments as manifested in various genres and media, particularly in autobiographies, fictional memoirs, road novels, and travelogues produced by African, Afrodiasporic and Afropean writers as well as music, movies, and art forms by musicians and artists settled in different countries, the contributors to this special issue set out to investigate representations of transcultural histories in African Anglophone literature and media from an interdisciplinary perspective. The main objective is to scrutinize not merely the relationship between Africa and Europe, but also the different dimensions of African cultural imaginaries in Europe and vice versa. We aim to investigate not only how Europe imagines Africa, but also how Africans imagine Europe in the age of global mobility and migration.

Certainly, a significant number of scholarly studies have by now addressed the connection between Africa and Europe from a variety of angles. For example, Yolanda Aixelà-Cabré’s edited volume has inspired us to make the idea of ‘Africa in Europe, Europe in Africa’ central to this issue.³⁹ Sabrina Brancato’s work Afro-Europe: Texts and Contexts is another seminal text that posits “Afro-Europe” as “a new way of understanding Europeanness”⁴⁰ and highlights a comparative approach to chart continuities across African experiences and literary productions in different European countries (10). Brancato clarifies that her “use of the term Afro-Europe essentially denotes a political choice, by purposefully wanting to place emphasis on the necessity for the notion of European identity (and, by extension of the European literary canon) to become more inclusive” (12). She also makes the case for a “genuinely transcultural” (108) approach that we build on here. In her later edited work Afroeurope@n Configurations: Readings and Projects, which brings together essays on African literary and cultural production across Europe, from the Canary Islands to Russia, Brancato consciously avoids “any kind of prescriptive definition of what is supposed to constitute Afroeurope”⁴¹ for the sake of a “multiplicity of perspectives” (1). Yet, at the heart of her understanding of Afroeurope is “the importance of dismantling the myth of white Europe” (5) – something that feels “obvious” (5) to her but not yet “visible to everybody” (5).

Taking a similar theoretical point of departure as Brancato’s work, Elisabeth Bekers, Sissy Helff, and Daniela Merolla’s Transcultural Modernities: Narrating Africa in Europe⁴² investigates Africa and Europe from a transcultural vantage point. The volume adopts a “strategic use of the reversed label ‘Euro-African’ in order to challenge the Eurocentric understanding of identity-formation implied by the commonly used term ‘Afro-European’,”⁴³ and it underscores the permeability of culture that challenges the existence of an absolute ‘other.’⁴⁴ In one of the contributions, Susan Arndt proposes that “literatures need to be conceived of in a perspective that both ‘provincializes Europe’ and ‘globalizes Africa’ ”⁴⁵ – a perspective which seeks to approximate historical and discursive power imbalances by drawing on Dipesh Chakrabarty’s influential thinking.⁴⁶ Building on Narrating Africa in Europe, published as a special issue of Matatu in 2009, this issue on “Transcultural Histories in African Anglophone Literature and Media” covers literary perspectives alongside other media such as film, documentaries, art, and music, among others, to underscore the varied forms that cultural expressions of transcultural entanglements between Africa and Europe take. Moreover, it seeks to understand Africa and Europe as ambivalent constructs that have historically been mired in a dichotomous power imbalance which lingers, but which is also challenged and minimised in recent artistic and scholarly endeavours. The two continents are increasingly imagined and discussed as transcultural geographies, which entails a grappling with legacies of discursive othering while also highlighting cultural exchange and transformation.

Recently, Locating African European Studies: Interventions, Intersections, Conversations, edited by Felipe Espinoza Garrido, Caroline Koegler, Deborah Nyangulu and Mark U. Stein, posits the field not only as an academic one, but also as one constituted by the involvement of “artists and writers, activists and students, academics and experts”⁴⁷ and seeks to further enhance and render visible the ongoing importance of transcontinental connections. While commenting on historical power imbalances between Africa and Europe (4), the volume notably cautions against reducing “Africans in Europe […] to victimhood” (6). The editors call for “further mainstreaming” (6) works by “African European scholars and activists” (6) as well as the many active contributions made by African Europeans in society. This special issue participates in these efforts, as it includes literary and cultural narratives by established and new voices alike, ranging from the by now well-established writer Chika Unigwe’s On Black Sisters’ Street⁴⁸ (Oluwadunni O. Talabi) to Nana Oforiatta Ayim’s debut novel The God Child⁴⁹ (Dirk van Rens).

Afro-European connections in African Anglophone literature, as we refer to it here, are of course also interrogated in volumes on Black and Asian British writing, which often focus on the presence of African and Afrodiasporic characters in Britain. Madhu Krishnan’s essay “Reimagining Africa: Contemporary Figurations by African Britons”⁵⁰ is noteworthy for its charting of the multiple imaginaries articulated in literary texts about Africa and Europe as well as more specific locations within. She postulates that “[i]t is impossible to generalise the ways in which the cultural histories, genealogies, and entanglements through which Africa emerges in black British writing function.”⁵¹ If it is impossible to generalise with regard to Britain, then this train of thought would suggest that the same holds true for narratives emerging in other contexts – whether in Europe or Africa. Notably, further national frameworks imply that a distinct identity and concomitant narratives exist, with terms like “Afro-German”⁵² and “Afro-Sweden”⁵³ having emerged to describe specific national experiences and transnational connections. Yet, such terms tend to subsume inner-African distinctions while maintaining distinctions with regard to European nation-states. Furthermore, this proliferation of terms is not echoed when describing Europeans in Africa. There seems to be no discussion of Euro-Ghanaians or Euro-Nigerians, for instance, even when such scarcely used terminological combinations may tell us more about the connections between Europe and Ghana or Europe and Nigeria. As part of our methodology, we have tried to focus on Africa in relation to Europe and vice versa in our special issue, paying attention to phenomena across spatial scales, in order to offer a more nuanced reading of entangled histories and cultures. The articles in this issue indicate not only particular experiences, but they also come together to speak to shared concerns in a manner that reflects transcultural theory’s concern with differences alongside similarities and connections. For instance, the contribution on Nikki May’s Wahala (Innocent Akili Ngulube) underscores the adoption of hybrid Afropean identities with protagonists finding Africa in Europe, while the comparative reading of Buchi Emechata’s Kehinde and Tayie Selasi’s Ghana Must Go (Rita Shika Amelordzi) shows the importance of familial relations in Afrodiasporic families and of returning to Africa to retrace memories.

Since this special issue focuses on Anglophone texts, it seeks to contribute to ongoing debates about the role of the English language. As already noted, the relationship between Africa and Britain has perhaps received most critical attention due to the English language and British Imperialism. However, as contributions to this issue indicate, the scope of Anglophone literary studies expands to contexts that have traditionally fallen outside of the realm of English studies, as is the case of Anglophone literature written about African experiences in Germany (Claudia Sackl). Moreover, Anglophone texts constitute a linguistic contact zone, as is the case in T.L. Huchu’s fiction that draws on a mixture of Shona and English and merges Zimbabwean and Scottish music while articulating a postdiasporic identity (Tanaka Chidora). Similarly, issues of translation and editing reflect unequal power dynamics, as the case of Leo Africanus’s early modern Geography indicates (Jennifer Leetsch). This volume closes with an interview with Jordan Awori, a Kenyan artist based in Frankfurt, Germany, to explore how power dynamics influence artistic practice and how her artworks eschew labels, while showing the ongoing pertinence of transcultural histories across Africa and Europe and beyond (Athena Solomon Berhane).

The very notion of transcultural histories also begs the perplexing question if a history of African Anglophone literatures exists, as several important studies have dealt with this question, like African Pasts: Memory and History in African Literatures,⁵⁴ or the volume on African Literatures.⁵⁵ Simon Gikandi astutely remarks that naturally African oral literature, produced in Arabic, Amharic, Swahili, and other African languages, had been produced outside the institution of colonialism, yet African writing beginning with the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885 and decolonization in the late 1950s and 1960s was shaped by colonialism.⁵⁶ However, Gikandi adds that in the late 19th century, literature “bec[a]me one of the most important weapons of cultural resistance against European intervention in Africa”.⁵⁷ In light of Gikandi’s observations, African Anglophone literatures, including other media, can be divided into three broad periods: “pre-colonial”, “colonial”, and “post-colonial”.⁵⁸ The highly contested postcolonial phase, during which a large number of African states gained independence,⁵⁹ is now often terminologically replaced with a decolonial phase. This phase – postcolonial or decolonial – is shaped by the most prominent historian-cum-literary artists such as Nigerian authors Chinua Achebe, Buchi Emecheta, Flora Nwapa, Ben Okri, Wole Soyinka or Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o as the first generation of African writers who vehemently contested colonial enterprises in Africa and their destructive impact on African cultures and traditions. This phase is further shaped by the second generation of African diasporic writers such as Paul Gilroy, Caryl Phillips, or Stuart Hall whose works have become a prime source of explicating African history and identity from a broad perspective since the 1980s.

Keeping this transformation in mind, the postcolonial phase of African Anglophone literatures can also be named African Anglophone Diasporic Literature,⁶⁰ African Migrant Literature, or African Global Literature. Opponents may object to claims that the entire history of Africa should be pinned to colonialism in one way or the other. There is certainly no straightforward, persuasive response to such a plausible critique. Yet, what is significant about the three-phase-approach to African history is that it reminds us that “[a] consideration of history in African literatures involves far more than the study of narratives about the past”,⁶¹ meaning the colonial past, as Stephanie Newell argues. Different literary texts and media are evocative of and a manifestation of historical specificities that urge a thinking not merely around but also beyond the colonial lens. This is the reason that we set out to focus on transcultural histories in this special issue as opposed to only colonial histories to expand our spectrum of Africa and its connections with Europe, showcasing how each African fictional text offers a unique snapshot of history, which provides a new insight into Africa and African diaspora today.

Newell’s three-tiered methodology to examine African literary histories and history in African literature is suitable to making sense of the rich and diverse as well as scattered and mobile history of Africa as represented in literature and media. In this methodology, she first considers “time and space of literary productions” (475); then, “the way in which works of literature engage with the concepts of time, memory, and historical consciousness” (476); and finally, “the temporal and geographical distances separating literary works from their current audiences” (476). The engagement with historical consciousness in the second reading methodology besides time and memory is crucial to our special issue, since we argue that a considerable amount of 21st century African Anglophone literature and media are a rich site for the production of historical consciousness. Although Newell defines historical consciousness as referring to “the ways in which authors problematize the representation of time and memory in their narratives, as well as a fictional character’s reflexive sense of being in time”,⁶² we approach historical consciousness in the way Gilroy interprets, namely connecting it to “double consciousness”.⁶³ Gilroy is preoccupied with the double consciousness in the sense W.E.B. Du Bois who defines it as “this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others”.⁶⁴ We argue, however, that Gilroy’s double consciousness has assumed a new dimension and meaning. Now African writers not only challenge and contest the colonial gaze, but fictionalise history to offer their way of coming to terms with their past and identity. Hence, the writing back paradigm⁶⁵ is replaced with an interest in “writing forward”, meaning that Africans, either at home or in the diaspora, tend to look to the future rather than the past as the only anchor of their self and identity. Such an approach in our special issue is conducive to approaching Africa from a more innovative and global standpoint.

We also argue that prominent concepts like Pan-Africanism, négritude, Afropolitanism, Afrasia or Afro-Asian transactions, transoceanic belongings, gender and class conflicts in North Africa or the Arab World, circulating in African studies, have their roots in transnationalism, globalisation, and modernity as much as African history as a transcultural entity as represented in Anglophone literature and media. These concepts not only evoke processes of de- and re-territorialization in terms of African history and geography, but also invite us to locate Africa in heterogeneous cultural and oceanic contexts, e.g. in the hybrid cultural realm of the Indian Ocean, which is neither fully African or Indian but Afrasian;⁶⁶ or in the Black Atlantic, which Paul Gilroy conceptualises as neither fully African, Caribbean, American, nor entirely British, but as a transcultural space.⁶⁷ Building on these cultural entanglements, Ananya Jahanara Kabir delves deeper into “the sedimented histories of transoceanic creolization that connect the continent to both Atlantic and Indian oceans.”⁶⁸ In line with such theoretical debates, Derek Walcott’s famous poem envisages “[t]he sea as history,”⁶⁹ with both sea and history operating beyond territorial nationalism and constraints.

Phillips also reminds us that the sea “carries Africa on her back like an island,”⁷⁰ underlining the role of seas and oceans in the making of histories around and beyond Africa. The transoceanic paradigm evokes an image of history that is not only intertwined and porous but is a work in progress, as more and more writers seek to excavate new historical connections that are either ignored, erased, or forgotten due to the dominance of colonial histories. Gurnah’s novels Paradise⁷¹ and By the Sea⁷² are paradigmatic examples of East African coastlines as a site of colonial encounters as well as histories across the oceans, covering refugees, asylum seekers, and forced migrants from Africa in Europe. M.G. Vassanji’s novels The Gunny Sack⁷³ and The In-Between World of Vikram Lall⁷⁴ are striking instances of the East African coastline as a landscape of Indian-African transactions as much as their mutual struggles with British colonialists. Likewise, Kenyan writer Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor’s novel The Dragonfly Sea⁷⁵ is emblematic of oceans as (post)colonial infrastructures and geopolitical entities, focusing on Sino-African relations and Chinese imperial endeavours in East Africa. In fact, notions of transoceanic entanglement – as developed by Kabir and Hanna Teichler⁷⁶ – as well as Afropolitanism coined by Selasi⁷⁷ and theorised by Achille Mbembe⁷⁸ particularly compel a thinking beyond and around African borders as well as Black Africa. The Arab World, for example, cannot be equated with Black Africa as much as South Africa cannot be synonymised with it.

If transoceanic exchange offers a new entryway into understanding African histories from a transcultural standpoint and connecting it to the “oceanic turn”⁷⁹ in the Humanities, Afropolitanism, an intriguing emergence from the more familiar notion of cosmopolitanism, is a clarion call for extricating the African past from a long legacy of victimhood and suppression. The new generation of Africans, especially women writers like Nigerian American writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie or British Nigerian author Chibundu Onuzo have turned out to be the embodiments and promoters of this concept with novels such as Americanah⁸⁰ and Sankofa.⁸¹ Notably, Afropolitanism urges us to look at African identity and history, especially of Africans in diaspora, from a brand-new angle. Gikandi claims that it is “Afropessimism,” invariably associated with African history, that is finally replaced by “Afropolitanism,” leading to a celebration of “cultural hybridity – to be of Africa and of other worlds at the same time.”⁸²

In effect, transoceanic transactions and Afropolitanism appear and reappear in contemporary African Anglophone literature and media in diverse manners, urging the notion of global Africa and its diasporas around the world. More importantly, the twin dynamics of these concepts place Africa in a transnational and transcultural framework which envisages African histories on the move and Africans as figures of mobility, transcending African as much as European borders, and thus creating an African cultural imaginary that encompasses the local and the global in multiple ways. These multiple ways of representation are fundamental in our special issue, which aims to contribute a fresh perspective to current discourses.