Date of Award
5-10-2026
Date Published
June 2026
Degree Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Arts (MA)
Department
African American Studies
Advisor(s)
Joan Bryant
Keywords
African Diaspora;Afropolitanism;Digital Nation;Pan-Africanism;Podcast Community
Subject Categories
African Studies | International and Area Studies | Social and Behavioral Sciences
Abstract
This thesis examines configurations of global African nation-building as represented through the Afropolitan digital nation. The Afropolitan digital nation is an ecosystem of digital platforms founded by Eche Emole and Chika Uwazie in 2022 that self-identifies as a "digital nation" for the African diaspora. The study uses qualitative methods of digital content analysis and discourse analysis, through social media platforms, podcast, websites, applications, and semi-structured interviews with its co-founder and a dissenting research collective to answer the following question: What configurations of global African nation-building are represented through the Afropolitan Digital platform, and how do these work to globalize the identities, experiences, and conceptions of Africans and the diaspora? The analyses of this study are organized across three chapters that examine Afropolitan's polity and economy in Chapter 1, its citizenship structure in Chapter 2, and its society and culture in Chapter 3. These analytical chapters also function as frames of analysis that reference historical nation-state formations. Further, this research draws upon a number of theoretical frameworks including James Scott's conception of state simplifications, Tony Elumelu's Africapitalism, Roger Smith's conception of citizenship, Benedict Anderson's imagined communities for nation-building, Antonio Gramsci's cultural hegemony, and African Technocultural Feminist Theory. Using these frameworks, I argue that Afropolitan performs a novel form of nation-building through the ideology and aesthetics of their project all while reproducing familiar structures of class exclusion, capital dependency, and compulsory heterosexuality at granular levels of its structure. Finally, this research situates the Afropolitan digital nation within the broader genealogies of Black trans-nationalism, Pan-Africanism, and the network state formations through emerging technologies. This thesis ultimately argues that Afropolitan represents a novel yet contradictory manifestation of Black self-determination in the twenty-first century that is stems from a wound of diasporic rootlessness and simultaneously constrained by the neoliberal conditions that produced it.
Access
Open Access
Recommended Citation
Ezejiofor, Uchenna, "Digital Space is the Place: Examining Dimensions of Global African Nation Building in the Afropolitan Digital Nation" (2026). Theses - ALL. 1036.
https://surface.syr.edu/thesis/1036
