Excerpt From 2014 Journal Article "Styling Africanness in Amsterdam" By Marleen de Witte

Edited by Azizi Powell

This pancocojams post presents an excerpt from the 2014 journal article "Styling Africanness in Amsterdam" By Marleen de Witte.

The content of this post is presented for socio-cultural and historical purposes.

As a reminder, I present excepts of articles and books on this blog to raise awareness about them, with the hope that this blog's visitors will read the entire published work, if possible.

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Thanks to Marleen de Witte and all those who are quoted in this post.

Click https://pancocojams.blogspot.com/2018/10/how-petit-afros-youtube-dance-videos.html for Part I of a four part series on Holland's Petit Afro. That series serves as a supplement to this post on "Styling Africanness In Amsterdam".

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FEATURED EXCERPT:
From http://booksandjournals.brillonline.com/content/journals/10.1163/18725465-00702002
"Open Access Heritage, Blackness and Afro-Cool

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Styling Africanness in Amsterdam
image of African Diaspora

Author: Marleen de Witte 1

Source: African Diaspora, Volume 7, Issue 2, pages 260 – 289 Publication Year : 2014

DOI: 10.1163/18725465-00702002

ISSN: 1872-5457 E-ISSN: 1872-5465

Document Type: Research Article

Subjects: African Studies

Keywords: identité black; afro-néerlandais; africanité; Blackness; Self-styling; afro-cool; Afro-Dutch; Africanness; héritage culturel Africain; stylisation de soi; Cultural Heritage; Afro-cool

Open Access icon image of CC BY-NC Attribution-Non Commercial

Abstract
This article focuses on the recent emergence of an “Afro-Dutch” category of self-identification among young people in Amsterdam. Dutch-born youth of different Afro-Caribbean and African backgrounds show a new sense of (and search for) a shared African heritage, and a growing desire for public exposure and recognition of this Africanness. Manifesting in, for example, media initiatives, performing arts, cultural festivals, and bodily fashions, this trend is characterized by an aesthetic emphasis on globalized African styles and by political struggles about the inclusion of African heritage in Dutch imaginations of nationhood. Approaching Africanness as a process of becoming and a practice of self-styling, this article explores the convergence between the renewed interest in African roots among Dutch-born Afro-Caribbeans and the ways in which Ghanaian youth engage with their African origins. It discerns three prominent, but contested tropes with regard to their framing and design of Africanness: “African heritage”, “blackness” and “Afro-cool”.

Introduction

Who is an African? What does it mean to be African in Europe? Is African the same as Afro? Are black people automatically African? These questions are hotly debated among young people in Amsterdam today. On online discussion fora, Facebook pages, and blogs, and in community centres, entertainment halls, and at festival grounds, questions of African identity, belonging, and heritage are recurrent and their answers diverse, and often passionately argued.

Joyce1 is a fashion designer, born in Amsterdam of Ghanaian parents: “I can be Dutch and Ghanaian at the same time and both things are true. But inside, I am African; my parents gave me that … even if I didn’t feel African until I was 22.”2 Now, her African background is an important source of inspiration for the clothes she designs, and likes to wear. Angela is a hairdresser and a student of fashion. She said: “I was born in Curacao of mixed blood, even Spanish, and raised in the Netherlands, but I am simply African.”3 Nothing in her professional practice or her dressing style explicitly shows this and she has never been to any African country; for her, being African consists of a strong awareness of the history of transatlantic slavery and the place of origin of some of her ancestors. Bamba Nazar is a well-known DJ in Amsterdam’s Afro music scene. Born in Amsterdam of a white Dutch mother and a black Surinamese father, he grew up largely in Suriname, lived in New York for some years, and then returned to Amsterdam. He said: “I see myself first of all as an African, I recognize my roots. Our history and who we are is a very powerful thing.”4 His recognition of his African roots resulted in him organizing an annual African Homecoming festival.

For a few years, young Dutch people of what in official discourse would be termed “different ethnic backgrounds” – “Ghanaian”, “Antillean” and “Surinamese” – show an emergent sense of – and search for – a shared African heritage, and a growing desire for public exposure and recognition of this Africanness as part of new, hybrid forms of being Dutch. A new identity label is in vogue: “Afro-Dutch”. Kenneth, however, born in Amsterdam of black Surinamese parents, is critical of the label: “All this Afro stuff nowadays … pfff … I have got nothing to do with Africa. Some of my ancestors maybe, but not me. I am not ethnic; I am simply Surinamese-Dutch. Creole, Hindu, we are all Suris.”5 Kenneth explicitly rejects “this Afro stuff” that is increasingly in fashion nowadays, and wants to refrain from “being ethnic”. He rather claims a hyphenated identity as Surinamese-Dutch. Being Afro-Dutch is a choice, it appears, and competes or blends in with other identifications.

Being hotly debated as part of identity politics, Africanness is also, and increasingly so, mobilized in the arena of lifestyle and entertainment. A great variety of cultural entrepreneurs, from fashion designers, lifestyle magazines, and dance groups to bloggers, DJs, and other tastemakers, address a growing market for African styles. Inspired by globally circulating images and sounds of Africanness, and thriving on aesthetic appeal, design, and marketing, they vest “being African” with an aura of urban cool that attracts increasing numbers of young people and provide them with the materials – “all this Afro stuff” – with which to flesh out their – often newly found – identities.

To be clear, even if people themselves may use the category of Afro-Dutch quite matter-of-factly – in talking about “the Afro-Dutch community” for instance – it is not to be taken at face value as an “ethnic group” that automatically includes all who can trace ancestry to someplace in Africa. Rather, we are dealing here with a trend that a growing number of people, highly diverse in terms of ethnic and racial backgrounds, chose to join.6 In that sense, being African is also becoming African, as Joyce clearly expressed: “I didn’t feel African until I was 22.” One of the most influential theorists advancing an approach of cultural identity as both “being” and “becoming” has been Stuart Hall. In his seminal essay “Cultural identity and diaspora,” (1993: 392) Hall suggests that “perhaps instead of thinking of identity as an already accomplished fact, which the new cultural practices then represent, we should think, instead, of identity as a ‘production’, which is never complete, always in process, and always constituted within, not outside, representation”. The new Afro-cultural practices in Amsterdam do not express some already existing identity; they are the media through which previously non-existent Afro-Dutch identities are coming into being.

In this article I propose to approach Afro-Dutch identity as a practice of self-styling: designing the self and the group(s) to which one wants to belong by means of media, style, and (sub)cultural consumption. These things are often considered superficial, in contrast to something like “ethnicity”, that is supposed to be “deep-seated”. But I would like to stress that practices of self-styling and cultural consumption are at the heart of the contemporary identity question. My emphasis on style and self-styling takes inspiration from Michel Maffesoli’s understanding of “aesthetic style” as a binding force in an age in which primordial loyalties and group affiliations have lost their self-evidence (1996: 31ff.; see also Meyer 2009). It also refers to the ubiquity of the “I am …”, or what Sarah Nuttall has called “the emergence of explicit forms of selfhood within the public domain and the rise of the first-person singular within the work of liberation” (Nuttall 2004: 432). It thus directs attention to the social-aesthetic work involved in processes of identification and self-realization (which gets ever more urgent with the centrality of visual social media in young people’s lives). Across the globe young urbanites self-confidently mobilize and reassemble ethnic and cultural traditions as they fashion themselves in a global “identity economy” (Comaroff and Comaroff 2009; see also: Maher 2005). “African culture”, ever reinvented, ever reimagined, is booming as a reservoir of materials with which young people shape their lifestyles and identities, both in cities on the continent (e.g. De Witte and Meyer 2012; Nuttall 2004; Spronk, this issue) and in the diaspora (e.g. Sansone 1999). This is no different in Amsterdam, where “Africa” increasingly features as a source of pride, pleasure and empowerment for young black people in search of who they are. The question to be explored here is how this apparent process of self-styling comes into shape.

My approach to Africanness as self-design raises questions about the theoretical nexus of identity and authenticity and the role of anthropologists in substantiating the identity work of our interlocutors. Conceiving of Africanness not as some kind of authentic primordiality but as a historically and socially situated construct (see also the introduction to this issue), I posit that any assessment of whether or to what extent something is “authentically African” makes little sense (see Scott 1999, p. 108ff.). The question that remains to be addressed, however, is how self-constructed identities come to be experienced as authentic or primordial, that is, as anything but self-made. This would direct our focus not on “African authenticity” but on the practices of authentication that imbue designed selves with a “felt authentic grounding” (Van de Port 2004). Primordiality then may resurface as a resource people employ as part of their identity work. For instance, bodily tropes such as race, blood or DNA appear as powerful “authenticating devices”, such as when people ground their Africanness in phenotype (e.g. skin colour, hair type), bloodlines or genetic ancestry tests (Balkenhol 2011; Schramm et al. 2012). This interplay of design and authentication is an important theoretical and empirical question which I will pursue in detail elsewhere. Here I focus on the multiplicity of and dynamics between formulations of Africanness in a local setting with people of various African backgrounds.

What is interesting about the Dutch situation at this particular moment in history is that the renewed interest in African roots and self-styling among Dutch people of Afro-Caribbean (Surinamese, Antillean) backgrounds (Balkenhol 2011) coincides with the coming of age of a second generation of Africans (in Amsterdam predominantly Ghanaians), who engage with their so-called African heritage in ways that are very different from their parents’ ways of being African. The district of Amsterdam Southeast in particular is a place where groups from various black and African origins come and live together. With high concentrations of people categorized as being of “Surinamese” (32%), “Ghanaian” (10%), and “Antillean” (6%) descent (Amsterdam BOS 2013), it is home to a great variety of Afro-oriented cultural productions, media, and events. Here, second and third generations grow up in the same neighbourhood, attend school together, and hence develop their identities in interaction with each other.

This social reality seriously destabilizes the still dominant research focus on distinct “ethnic minority groups” (Brubaker 2004). In the Netherlands, dominant discourse about so-called “ethnic minorities” – apart from confusing country of origin with ethnicity – leaves little space for analyzing the processes of differentiation and merger that crosscut distinctions between officially recognized ethnic categories, as well as those between “ethnic minority” and “Dutch majority”. Crucially, such discourse persistently excludes minorities from Dutch nationhood by failing to acknowledge their Dutchness. Self-identification as Afro-Dutch, which clearly echoes (the now outdated) “Afro-American”, is also a claim to Dutchness and a call for recognizing hyphenated identities.7 Instead of reproducing the language of “ethnic minorities”, I suggest analyzing the trend towards Africanness in terms of dominant discourses about identity and selfhood that tout the value of “becoming who you really are” (Guignon 2004: 3) by discovering your “inner self” and styling yourself accordingly in the social (media) world.

In this process, the question of who or what is African, and on what grounds, turns out to be far from self-evident, even if statements like “I am simply African” present it as such. As the debates and stories presented in this article show, the difficulty of naming is part and parcel of the urgency with which young people discuss the issue of Africanness. Instead of taking their claims to Africanness for granted, I propose to study them as part and parcel of situated actions and events, creative and political projects, and discursive and aesthetic frames (Brubaker 2004: 11). Becoming African happens on the ground, in the encounters between people of various backgrounds. In these encounters and events, Africa features in different, sometimes contradictory ways. The question this article addresses is around what new forms of Africanness different “Afro-Dutch” groups can unite. And how the forms around which Afro-Dutch identities may crystallize are appropriated or contested. In what follows I explore the convergence between Dutch-born Africans and Afro-Caribbeans as they search for and design Africanness in media, expressive culture, and practices of self-styling. Differences in migration history, language, culture, and connection with Africa, make this convergence an ongoing search with an uncertain outcome, involving struggle, contestations, creativity and reflection.

As a background, I first give a brief description of the history and multiplicity of African diaspora in the Netherlands. Discussing examples from the burgeoning field of Afro-centred cultural production in Amsterdam, the second section sheds light on current trends and identifies three important tropes: “African heritage”, “blackness” and “Afro-cool”.8 The first two are empowering and engaging, but interpretations of heritage and blackness respectively seem too divergent and contested sometimes to bolster a collective Afro-identity. The third one, the recent trend towards a celebration of Afro-cool aesthetics in fashion and music, appears to hold more potential in that respect. Young people of various backgrounds unite more easily in the present turn to contemporary urban African arts and popular culture. Global in circulation and cosmopolitan in appeal, a variety of urban African cultural expressions provide young people in the diaspora with the positive vibe and fashionable aesthetics around which to shape a shared sense of Africanness.


African Diaspora in the Netherlands

In contrast to the US, in the Netherlands the hyphenated category of Afro-Dutch has only recently emerged, but also been contested, as a category of self-identification, mainly among young-Dutch born people of various black African and racially mixed backgrounds. Black migrants from Dutch ex-colonies in the Caribbean and various African countries have long been living in the Netherlands, albeit as somewhat distinct groups. Three main historical currents, although not strictly separable, contributed to the current composition of the Dutch African diasporic population: colonial history brought large groups of Surinamese and Antilleans to the Netherlands; post-WWII economic history accounts for today’s strong Moroccan presence; and political and economic crises in various African countries, especially since the 1980s, brought increasing flows of migrants seeking safer and/or ‘greener pastures’.

The largest presence of African-descended people in the Netherlands results from the Dutch participation in the transatlantic slave trade. Between 1600 and 1815 about half a million enslaved people, primarily from West African regions, were shipped to Dutch colonial possessions in the New World – initially Brazil, later Suriname, the Dutch Antilles, and Aruba. After the end of slavery in 1863, colonial authorities promoted the assimilation of the now free black population to Dutch culture, mainly through the colonial education system. In 1954 all inhabitants of the Dutch colonies became citizens, which opened the way for migration to the Netherlands. Whereas until 1965 small numbers of Surinamese and Antilleans had come to the Netherlands temporarily for study, from 1965 onwards larger numbers of Surinamese migrants from all socio-economic ranks came to find jobs or to apply for social security on the basis of their Dutch citizenship. Most Surinamese migrants, however, came just before Suriname’s independence in 1975, when those who had little confidence in the country’s economic and political future decided to leave. After independence, many more Surinamese made use of the ‘last option’ to migrate before they would lose their Dutch citizenship in 1980. A total of about 300,000 Surinamese came to stay in the Netherlands, over one-third of the entire Surinamese population. This is a very heterogeneous population, consisting of people of Hindustani, Creole, Javanese, Chinese, Maroon, Indian (native Surinamese) and mixed descent.9

A new flow of colonial migrants gained momentum in the 1990s: Antilleans. Before that time most Antilleans in the Netherlands were study migrants. Since the mid-1990s, more and more underprivileged Antillean youth came to look for economic chances in the Netherlands. They face many social problems and Dutch Antillean youth are often associated in the public imagination with criminality (Sharpe 2014: 109, 205). Because the Antilles are still part of the Dutch Kingdom, Antilleans are Dutch citizens and therefore entitled to free access to the country and its social security system. More than one-third of the Dutch Antillean population resides in the Netherlands (about 130,000 people).

In terms of post-WWII economic history, a defining moment was the shortage of labour force caused by the quick reconstruction and industrialization processes after the war. During the 1960s employers, and later the government, started recruiting semi- and unskilled industrial workers in Southern Europe and later in Turkey and North-Africa, primarily Morocco. First, second, and third-generation Turks and Moroccans, most of them Berber, now make up a large portion of the Dutch population. Despite their roots on the African continent, Moroccan-Dutch are not normally seen as being of African origin (without the qualifier North), whether by themselves or by others. This reveals a strong yet often taken-for-granted conflation of “African” with sub-Saharan African or black. The strong North-African presence in the Netherlands is relevant to exploring the category of Afro-Dutch and revealing its blurred, contested boundaries. Some African-oriented events and cultural productions do explicitly address Moroccan-Dutch as part of their audiences, but with limited success.

Since the 1980s the Netherlands has seen a growing influx of asylum seeking refugees from many parts of the world, caused by wars and political crises, but also by poverty and economic crises, and made possible by quick improvements in global communication and especially transport. Among others, large groups of Africans (predominantly Somali, Cape Verdeans, Ghanaians, Ethiopians, Eritreans and Egyptians), found their way to the country, through official or unofficial routes. Admission policies for asylum seekers have become stricter and stricter, and people whose application for asylum has been denied, are “removed” from the country via special “removal centres” [uitzetcentra]. Increasing numbers of people, however, opt for a life in “illegality”.

Dutch society is thus characterized by a high level of cultural diversity with a long history. But as much as the Netherlands has often been recognized as a prime European example of multiculturalism, it is at present accorded a paradigmatic status in what has been called “the retreat of multiculturalism” in Europe (Joppke 2004). Dutch policy and public debate exhibit a strong and persistent tendency of “othering” anyone who does not fit the image of mainstream white Dutchness (Essed and Trienekens 2008; Wekker 2009). Especially since the turn of the millennium, right-wing populism has been on the rise and a wave of anti-immigrant sentiments has been sweeping the country. African and Afro-Caribbean youth, born and raised in the Netherlands, are facing ongoing questioning of their Dutchness, and of the legitimacy of their being in the Netherlands, expressed as a growing pressure to adapt to “Dutch culture” or “fuck off to your own country”.10 As Sibo Kano, a contributor to the Afro-Europe blog, writes:

Black people in Europe, whether with brown or black skin, whether born there or not, whether having a white parent or not, whether adopted or not, whether they speak the national language or not, whether integrated or not, … are all perceived as a certain kind of foreigners from a common continent. […] This experience is central in the creation of our identity.11

Undoubtedly, the growing popularity of the “Afro-Dutch” category of self-identification comes partly in response to shared experiences of racist othering. Such experiences not only “force [black youth] to recognize their commonality as “blacks” or “Africans”” (Blakely 2005: 593); they also urge them to proclaim that, although not white, they too are Dutch. However, behind this “commonality as “blacks”” in the face of everyday racism, important differences, if not tensions, exist between various African-descended groups in the Netherlands that complicate their “commonality as Africans” or any taken-for-granted assumptions about an “Afro-Dutch” identity.

Differences in colonial and migration history have produced disparities with regard to familiarity with Dutch language and culture, access to citizenship, and socio-economic prospects. Migrants from the (former) Dutch colonies in the Caribbean had already been part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, were imbued with Dutch culture and language, and, mostly, saw themselves as Dutch. It was when they migrated to the Netherlands that their Dutchness was called into question and met with (racist) opposition from the majority, white Dutch society that generally perceived and treated Surinamese and Antillean immigrants as foreigners (Balkenhol 2011: 140). For Ghanaian migrants, the lack of a colonial link to the Netherlands makes for a very different relationship to Dutch society, language and culture, with most of them perceiving themselves as foreigners in a host country. Their children thus come to the question of being Dutch from a different direction than their Caribbean peers. As regards the question of being African, there are, of course, significant differences in the connection to and the imagination of Africa between Afro-Caribbean and Ghanaian Dutch. Whereas for most Surinamese and Antillean Dutch Africa is first of all an imagined place, Ghanaian Dutch have a direct link to a concrete place that their parents call home, even if they may not have visited it themselves. They may speak or understand a Ghanaian language, and know how to appreciate Ghanaian food. Such cultural familiarity, however, does not automatically make them identify as African.

For many Ghanaian Dutch youth, their African background used to be less a source of pride than of uneasiness, confusion and even shame, especially so in interactions with non-Africans. Partly, this had to do with the dominant image of Africa in the mainstream media and the public imagination as poor, war-torn, and backward. Added to this was a local dynamics of ethnic stereotyping between different “black” groups in Amsterdam Southeast. In particular, an aversion for Africans on the part of many Surinamese and Antillean blacks (see also Bijnaar 2002: 137), nurtured by longstanding stereotypes, has coloured many Africans’ experiences of growing up in Amsterdam, especially in Southeast with its large Surinamese population. In a way, being black was easier than being African and some Ghanaian youngsters chose to identify with the generalized “black” community in Amsterdam Southeast and keep silent about their being African. With the current global success of popular music and dance styles from urban Africa (especially West Africa), the connotations of defining oneself as African are now changing for the positive. Azonto in particular, a Ghanaian urban dance style that became wildly popular transnationally (Shipley 2013), has played a crucial role in elevating the image of young Ghanaians in Amsterdam and making it attractive to be or become African. As many of them expressed, being African is suddenly “cool”.

Clearly, such historical fluctuations complicate often-heard naturalizing statements like “I am black thus I am African” and indeed the very notions of “Afro-Dutch” or “the Dutch African diaspora” as unifying categories. They speak to the variety and mutability of experiences of being black/African, of what that African part of one’s identity means and does. Naturally, these experiences are different for every individual, situated in personal biographies, families, neighbourhoods and schools. But they also emerge out of histories of slavery, imperialism, colonialism, post-colonialism and migration. These histories, as Marta Sofía López points out, have “enormously complicated the definition of what being ‘African’ means” (2008: 4). The boom in platforms (online and offline) created by and for African-descended people in the Netherlands also speaks to a longing to discuss this question, to share experiences, and to unite around a positive image of Africa. One thing seems crucial for all young people exploring their African roots: the presence of inspiring and uplifting images of Africa and Africans, an “iconography that you would wrap your African identity around”, as a Ghanaian-British put it in a recent vlog. Much of the current trend towards Africanness in Amsterdam thrives on young people’s passionate dedication to establishing and participating in such Afro-iconographies through the production, circulation, and consumption of media content, images, cultural performances, and lifestyle products.

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Conclusion

Setting out from a sense of wonder about the recent emergence of “Afro-Dutch” as an overarching identity label among young Dutch people of a variety of backgrounds, in this article I have explored the multiple ways in which people engage with this “Afro” part of who they feel they are. A young generation of “new Dutch” is growing up, who are not defined by so-called ethnic identities, but actively and creatively shape who they are and want to become, combining a variety of cultural resources from Europe, America, and Africa. Tracing their roots to Africa via different routes, Afro-Dutch youth design and debate “being African” in ways that transcend (or complement) earlier generations’ identifications and seriously problematize any taken-for-granted notions of “the African diaspora”. As I have shown, such new Afro-Dutch identities are formed in a plural political and aesthetic field, which is marked as much by racialized power structures as by neo-liberal dynamics of marketing and commodification. Manifesting in, for example, media initiatives, performing arts, music, cultural festivals and bodily fashions, the current trend towards Africanness is characterized by an aesthetic emphasis on African styles. It entails a reinvention of “African culture” both as a source of Afropolitan pleasure and (individualized) self-expression, and as a source of (collective) black empowerment in a context marked by racism, inequality, and exclusion.

With its multiple genealogies and histories, the idea of Africa (Mudimbe 1994) – and, for that matter, Africanness – is of course extremely complicated. The key concern in this article has been to see what happens in practice when these genealogies come together in a local setting as young people explore their commonalities as descendants of Africa. Approaching Africanness as a process of becoming and a practice of self-styling, I have discerned three prominent discursive and stylistic tropes with regard to their framing and designing of Africanness: “African heritage”, “blackness” and “Afro-cool”. What the examples of the Afro-Caribbean dance group Untold Empowerment, the Ghanaian Kente Festival, and the African Homecoming Festival have shown is that these tropes get mobilized and fleshed out, joined, and disjointed in quite different ways.

For Untold, African heritage denotes the culture that diasporic Africans were severed from when they were taken away from their continent as slaves, and the culture that was suppressed during the period of slavery. This directs the interest in Africa towards the pre-modern past, to so-called “traditional” dances and costumes, and to “African survivals” on the other side of the Atlantic, in particular Suriname. The staging of this heritage serves to disseminate knowledge about and recognition of this often silenced part of Dutch history. For the dancers and actors themselves, learning and embodying this heritage through dance is a way of strengthening their self-esteem as black youth. The case of the Kente Festival showed that the initiators of the event – first-generation migrants – framed kente cloth within a national framework of Ghanaian cultural heritage. As the Ghanaian youth took charge for the 2013 edition, the festival shifted towards a celebration of heritage as incorporated into Afropolitan fashion styles, a shift that parallels developments in urban Ghana (De Witte and Meyer 2012). The African heritage encountered at the African Homecoming festival was framed as “the legacy of the black people”. Its vision of a Pan-Africanist revival was strongly inspired by the historical experiences and struggles of black people in the Americas, and in particular, the United States.

This brings us to blackness, a dominant, but not unproblematic trope in formulations of Africanness. Both Untold and African Homecoming connect Africanness directly to “blackness”, Untold with its focus on empowering black youth and African Homecoming with its emphasis on the black family. But whereas some take the relationship between blackness and Africanness for granted, e.g. Afro-Caribbeans stating “I am black thus I am African” (and contradicting their parents saying “I am black, but I am not African”), others deliberately try to open up the boundaries of the category of African and the criteria for inclusion and question the place of blackness in formulations of Africanness (e.g. “I am African but I am not black”). At the Kente Festival blackness was not a prominent reference and it also featured white models presenting African fashion items. Ghanaian-Dutch fashion blogger Augustina preferred the word brown in response to the strong black framing of the African Homecoming festival, and a Ghanaian-Dutch participant at the debate questioned the language of black kinship altogether. This is not to say that Ghanaian and Afro-Caribbean Dutch do not convene around notions of blackness. They do, mostly so in response to racial inequalities and stereotyping in Dutch society. But in identifying as African, blackness is not an uncontested trope. The malleability of blackness, and its variable ascription to bodily features, history and cultural style, urges us to explore in greater detail when and how race becomes relevant, and how it is put to practice (cf. M’charek 2013). Here, it suffices to say that both the trope of African heritage and that of blackness seem too steeped in particular historical traditions, political traditions, and cultural traditions in different parts of global Africa to easily serve as a binding force in the forging of a shared African identity.22

Young people of different African and black backgrounds converge more easily in a current “aesthetics of Afro-cool”, inspired by contemporary urban African fashion and music. This trend was prominently present at the Kente festival and the African Homecoming festival alike, and popular among Untold’s members, even if it did not fit Untold’s project objectives. Afro-cool is about feeling the spirit of a vibrant continent and indulging in its creativity and “fresh aesthetics”. It may flirt with the ancient and the tribal, but always with a playful and cosmopolitan twist. It is about being part of the making of something new, of a new generation oriented towards the future – wearing “Africa is the Future” T-shirts. In that sense Afro-cool is less burdened with the different histories and genealogies that cling to the tropes of heritage and blackness. It is also about “rebranding Africa”, “refreshing the world’s view of Africa, correct misperceptions and shatter old stereotypes, by showing that what gives urban Africa its funk and vibe today is far removed from the tired and narrow clichés of safaris, traditional drums, corruption, poverty, war and disease”.

This new delight in the funk and vibe of Africa is clearly part of a broader, transnational revitalization of African culture as an Afropolitan style that connects young urban middle classes across Africa and the African diaspora and contests the marginalization of Africa in the world order. A vibrant African urban pop culture is going global and this makes being African cool and fashionable. In today’s global identity market, Africanness is becoming available as a lifestyle trend, targeted at those with a taste for African-inspired products and designed to make them feel on top of the world as Africans, proudly wearing “I am African” T-shirts. In the current neo-liberal era, “African culture” circulates easily through the circuits of the global market and at the same time is easily embodied through affective attachment (Comaroff and Comaroff 2009: 18, 28). Worn on the body and danced to the beats, Afro-Dutch comes to denote a fleeting and open, African-inspired community of style, aesthetic pleasure, and shared passion. But in its commercially driven celebration of style and aesthetics also lies the major challenge to the trend of Afro-cool: it risks being accused, and indeed gets accused, of superficiality, commerciality, and lack of political engagement and historical consciousness.23 As a Surinamese-Dutch man at a youth debate about “roots, slavery, and international solidarity” said, “now with Afrobeats, AfroDance, Azonto … everybody feels attracted to Africa. But only to the nice part, not to the painful part of the history.” Ironically, it is exactly this lack of historical weight that seems to make this trend most capable of providing a new, highly diverse generation of Afro-Dutch with a pivot around which to develop a shared African identity."....
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This is the end of article except for references and notes

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