New Ecologies: Migritude, Migration and Olumide Popoola’s Poetic Work

The paper explores the possibility of reading the work of the Nigerian German UK-based writer Olumide Popoola, one of the prominent figures associated with the Afro-German queer movement, in the key of Migritude, a concept proposed by Shalja Patel, a South Asian artist brought up in Kenya who later emigrated to the United States. Patel employs the term to refer to processes of errancy and reinvention of the self through performance. I draw on Popoola’s work This is Not About Sadness and her spoken-word poems to articulate the possibility of the refunctioning of avant-gardism in a feminist, queer context that crisscrosses the Western space, reshapes the notion of the nation, and draws on avant-garde experiments in non-Western contexts. I argue that, employing avant-garde conventions and revolutionizing poetic form, Popoola reframes the national aspirations of a post-1989 German society and offers the possibility of critique by deconstructing the Western reliance on experimental monopoly.