Dr. Elias Adanu
I am an Assistant Professor of Rhetoric and Writing Studies with scholarly interests in cultural and visual rhetorics, non-western rhetorics, and African Diaspora Studies. At these intersections, I explore how contemporary Africans on and off the continent experiment with, and perform their Africanity in literary, digital, and visual spaces. I am interested in how global ideas about Africa and Africans – rhetorically constructed through centuries of racism, imperial conquest, slavery, and apartheid – interact with contemporary trends in African modernity.
Within this agenda, my current book project takes up Afropolitanism as a viable analytical category for registering recent attempts by cosmopolitan Africans to rewrite their place in the world. Building on theories of rhetorical circulation, mobility, and publics, this project demonstrates how the Afropolitan idea circulates in critical theory, literary representation, digital, and visual spaces.
As an avid photographer, I am also invested in visual rhetorics, specifically how photography shapes public culture and national identity.