Circulation connotes flow and movement. Africa is at the center of an immense, multidirectional circulation of communities, cultural practices, and innovations. The speed at which things move into and out of Africa and the transformations and innovations that accompany them can be dizzying and dazzling. Judith Byfield highlights the African, African-American, and Swedish cuisine at Marcus Samuelsson’s Red Rooster restaurant in New York City. Samuelsson’s multicultural turn in the kitchen is matched by the combination of indigenous athletic traditions and European form that shape African football/soccer on the field. Peter Alegi captures the innovations African players have introduced as well as the ways African societies have indigenized the cultural performance of this global pastime.
Circulation, however, is not a neutral process. What circulates, how, and why are steeped in overlapping histories with different proportions of adventure, ambition, and greed. Textiles provide a rich source for stories about the circulation of communities, cultural practices, and innovations. Wax-print cloths, as Victoria Rovine shows, weave together stories of cultural and economic interactions among northern Europe, Southeast Asia, and West Africa. Although wax prints did not originate in Africa, this quintessential “African” textile can be seen wherever African communities form.
Newly formed African communities have sprung up across the United States, Europe, and Asia, especially in recent decades. As Chinese migrants settle across the African continent on farms and in mines and marketplaces, Africans are migrating to China as traders, missionaries, and workers. Guangzhou, China, hosts many of these African migrants. Michaela Pelican and Li Dong capture the experiences of these African migrants in a vivid photo essay. Heidi Østebø Haugen reveals the fervent efforts of Nigerian evangelical missionaries in China, who conduct their spiritual work under the watchful eye of the Chinese government.
In the same way that some Africans made Christianity their own, some African writers made European languages their own. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o is one of the most famous novelists, essayists, playwrights, and scholars in African literature. In an interview with his son Mukoma wa Ngugi, Ngũgĩ reflects on how African literary traditions were shaped by and challenged European literary conventions, forms, and languages.
Music, like literature, circulates in broad, complicated pathways. In New York the confluence of African-inspired musical forms (a lasting legacy of the transatlantic slave trade), urban disinvestment, and youth protest created rap music. As rap filled the airwaves beyond the United States, it became a defining feature of a globalized youth culture. In a sense, an African-inspired musical form has come back to Africa. Zakia Salime shows that in Algeria and Morocco rap connects young people to their counterparts in Paris, London, and New York. Rap has become the preferred medium through which young people express their dissatisfaction with and alienation from the current politics of their countries. Thus, the circulation of communities and cultures reflects the optimism of collaboration and innovation as well as the messiness of unequal relations of power.