Narratives of Transcultural Appropriation: Constructing Afropean Worlds, Questioning European Foundations (AFROPEA; ERC-StG, Grant Agreement 101075842)

Black Narratives of Transcultural Appropriation (AFROPEA)

Research Team

• Principal Investigator: Gianna Zocco
• Postdoctoral Researcher: Sandra Folie
• Doctoral Researcher: N.N.

Institution: Leibniz-Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung, Berlin (ZfL)

Project Overview

How is Europe imagined by African, African European, and African diasporic writers? The research project argues that there is a temporarily and spatially expansive, only partially known Black literary tradition engaging with Europe in aesthetically innovative ways. This tradition has not yet been studied from a perspective anchored in literary studies.

Research Approach

The project proposes a new, literature-specific, and comparative approach by employing transcultural appropriation as a heuristic lens. This will allow focusing on the following aspects:

1. Literary strategies of transcultural appropriation, i.e. on ways of imaginatively building Afropean worlds, shuffling hierarchies, reversing (neo-)colonialist discourse, rewriting modernity, and employing a rhetoric of property.
2. Literary references to (neo-)colonial logics of property, heritage, and belonging, i.e. on ways of revealing and questioning the European foundations that forced Black people into the position of being “appropriated” or excluded from claims of ownership since colonialism and slavery.

Research Goals

The goal is to develop a new perspective on Europe-related Black literature that challenges the reactive dependency and balances the Anglo- or Francocentric orientation associated with the framework of “writing back”. This will be achieved by:

• Studying texts written in less-studied European languages
• Depicting middle, eastern, and provincial parts of Europe
• Revealing gray areas beyond dominator vs. dominated
• Disclosing “forgotten” colonial histories
• Addressing Europe as a unity