Afro-European Pan-Africanism: A Twenty-First Century Black Europeans’ Mobilizations

Abstract

When Pan-Africanism is not historicized by reflecting on its beginning towards the mid-twentieth century, its nowness is usually attached to the African continent. In other words, a twenty-first-century understanding of Pan-Africanism remains exclusively tied to the African continent, specifically leaving out Afro-diasporic subjects and even more so Afro-Europeans. In this paper, I provide reasons for this situation, but I also argue that if the current conception of Pan-Africanism can no longer incorporate the fate, role, and conditions of Black diasporic subjects in the West, particularly in Europe, then it is valid to parallelly speak of Afro-European Pan-Africanism: a new connection of black European youth against racial discrimination and for an Afro-European political identity. In the twentieth century, Europe was a center for black intellectuals’ collaborations, but these black intellectuals were more of “sojourners” for anti-colonial struggles than advocate for the improvement of the black condition in a European context. I suggest Afro-European Pan-Africanism as marking, in the twenty-first century, new diasporic linkages and movements of black Europeans of African and Afro-Caribbean descent.