How to Mint a Digital Nation: Crypto-Capitalism and its African Merchants of Hope
In 2005, after backpacking across Africa, Taiye Selasi, wrote a brief essay in an obscure travel magazine about her encounter with a peculiar set of Africans. She named these Africans, Afropolitans, invoking their Africanity and cosmopolitanism. Selasi’s Afropolitans had sophisticated taste in music, fashion, literature, and global culture. They were culturally hybrid, sometimes of mixed ancestry, had personal and professional lives split between cities in Africa, Europe, and the Americas, and were at home in these multiple worlds. The subsequent adoption of the term in multiple domains – literature, visual and performing arts, philosophy, and pop culture – reflects a sustained attempt by Africans to rewrite their place in the world, to invent new descriptors for their experiences, and to recover the image of Africa beyond the brutal legacies of a haunted history. This project focuses on one such performance of Afropolitanism by a professional networking group which claims to be building a high tech “digital nation” powered by AI, cryptocurrencies, NFTs and other web 3.0 resources. A central aim is to assess the viability of digital nations as worthy instruments for transforming African futures.
Using theories of constitutive rhetoric, rhetorical circulation, digital diasporas, and a content analysis of the group’s online presence, this project investigates the emergent dependence of liberatory movements on the promises of web 3.0. The project analyzes the emancipatory rhetoric by which this specific digital diaspora invents a utopic vision of a future dependent on supranational digital platforms. I argue that while this vision of a digital nation highlights the agency of African diaspora actors in rehabilitating Africa’s image and may provide critical maps for revisioning the continent, it raises intractable issues about the role of untested technologies in fashioning Africa’s future.
An expected output is a new book chapter for my ongoing book manuscript and a substantial revision of the entire manuscript to cohere with this new chapter.
Main Research Topics
- African digital diasporas
- Visual rhetoric
- Internet cultures
- Media studies
Curriculum Vitae
- Assistant Professor, University of Texas at El Paso, 2022-present
- Visiting Assistant Professor, University of Texas at El Paso, 2020-2022
- Instructor of Record/Graduate Teaching Assistant, Texas A&M University, 2015- 2020
Publications and Presentations
- Adanu, E. (2024). Learning to Be Black in America: Heuristics of Racial Enculturation and Fraternal Nervousness Between African Immigrants and African Americans. Africana Annual, 1(1), 25-43. https://doi.org/10.17161/africana.v1i1.18442
- Adanu, E. “#Afropolitan: Visual Canons, Digital Archives, and the Performance of Black Mobility on Instagram.” (forthcoming)
- Adanu, E, & Dadugblor S. “I Don’t Take Card’: What Uber Drivers and Users in Ghana Can Teach Us about Localizing Foreign Technology.” (chapter in African Digital Cultures) In production with Amsterdam University Press