Speculating on the future: Mansour Ciss Kanakassy’s Pan-African AFRO currency at the intersection of Afrofuturism and Afropolitanism

This article investigates how Senegalese artist Mansour Ciss Kanakassy’s AFRO currency (2000–present), a Pan-African utopian currency meant to replace the CFA franc in francophone sub-Saharan Africa, mobilizes the concept of speculation , understood both as monetary business and as creative projection into the future, to articulate and live through the transitions, tensions, and possibilities at the intersection of two Afrocentric frameworks – Afrofuturism and Afropolitanism. While Afrofuturism deploys the ethos of Pan-Africanism to explore the formation of Black subjectivities in the US context, Afropolitanism operates a centrifugal projection of African identities onto a globalized world marked by the rigidification of borders and nationalisms. Ultimately, as the AFRO mobilizes the philosophy and aesthetics of Afrofuturism and Afropolitanism to challenge the Communauté Financière Africaine’s (CFA) racial capitalist dynamics, it helps visualize economic futures in which Africa holds a political, economic, and cultural role worldwide, and reveals the contours of African visualities in the field of French and francophone visual studies.