The Proto-Afropolitan Bildungsroman: Yoruba Women, Resistance, and the Nation in Simi Bedford’s Yoruba Girl Dancing

The fields of world literature and African literary studies are currently wrestling with the issue of scale in wondering how the worldliness of texts (their circulation, politics, etc.) impacts their ability to be culturally specific. Too often, a dichotomy between local and global has been the fallback position within both of these fields, arguing essentially that the more local a text is the less global it is and vice versa. This essay mobilizes the concept of Afropolitanism, a worldly African sensibility, to problematize such a facile formulation. In doing so, it turns to a widely praised though rarely analyzed novel, Simi Bedford’s 1991 Yoruba Girl Dancing, to argue that the proto-Afropolitanism of the novel offers an alternative lens through which to see African texts and literary figures who are constituted by multiple locales. In turning to an African text that was published before the current Afropolitan movement, this essay argues that Afropolitanism has a longer genealogy than currently acknowledged and that its ideological insights are useful even for texts published well before the termed gained its current cultural and literary capital.