Abstract
This essay poses and attempts to answer the central question, “what does African cultural studies
do?” It takes an autobiographical approach to address the genealogy, status quo and the potential
future of the floating signifier that is African Cultural Studies. It unpacks and multiplies African
cultural studies and contextualizes it as a form of African studies and as both interventionist in and
contributory to transnational cultural studies. African cultural studies marginality in the global
discourse is rearticulated as both a positioning of disempowerment on the one hand and one of
generative and insurgent politics on the other. Stressing the need for continental and diasporic
Africans to self-identify issues to be addressed (in place Eurocentric, imposed preoccupations),
the essay identifies as examples the always already complex nature of identity and belonging (and
the irony of emergent zenophobia); continental and diasporic relations that trouble the taken for
grantedness of what constitutes Africa(ns), and queer Africa in the face of institutionalized
homophobia. Whether local nativist or globally engaged approaches are taken, the essay
concludes, African cultural studies ought to be self-reflexively, dedicated not only to doing cultural
studies but to what the doing of African cultural studies does for Africa(ns) and for transnational
cultural studies.