"Now serving window number three. Welcome to the United States Immigration Center. Can I see your passport? Green card? Birth certificate, please? And what is your occupation, sir? A rapper? A rapper? OK."
"And now that the whole album is out and the story is out, tell me about the title, "Afropolitan." Now that's not a term you coined as I recall."
"No, not all. Actually, a lot of credit to Taiye Selasi. She's an amazing author and a friend of mine. She wrote an essay around 2005. In that essay, she used the term Afropolitan. And, you know, a lot of people have different definitions of it."
"I was looking for something that described who I was in terms of being young, being creative and being global. But at the end of the day, I felt what the Afro"
The program returns to immigrant stories told through first-hand accounts and creative works, focusing on an African immigrant in the U.S. told through hip-hop. Samuel Bazawule, known as Blitz the Ambassador, was born in Ghana and later moved to Brooklyn after studying marketing. His album Afropolitan Dreams follows his personal story beginning with arrival at an immigration center. The album’s title draws on the term Afropolitan, associated with writer Taiye Selasi, and is used to describe being young, creative, and global. Different definitions of Afropolitan exist, and Bazawule connects the concept to his own identity and experiences as an immigrant artist.
Read at www.npr.org
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