TYDSKRIF VIR LETTERKUNDE • 59(2) • 2022 ISSN: 0041-476X E-SSN: 2309-9070 59 Subsequent chapters explore the more conventional terrain of Afropolitanism, examining the short stories of Afrodiasporic writers Sef Atta and Chimamanda Ngozi (Chapter 2) and the homecoming narrative of the Francophone writer Alain Mabanckou (Chapter 3). Toivanen’s association of various types of class privilege with anxiety produced by the contradictory freedoms of “modern forms of mobility” creates a thread of postcolonial malaise running through the “troubled” psyche of the privileged postcolonial subjects examined in this section, countering the myth of carefree and somewhat facile cosmopolitanism defned by Taiye Selasi in “Bye-bye Babar (Or: What is an Afropolitan?)”, published in 2005. The middle section of the book, “Budget Travels, Practical Cosmopolitanisms”, moves further down the economic ladder, reading technologies of mobility through selected works by Liss Kihindou, Véronique Tadjo, NoViolet Bulawayo and Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche. Given the number of texts in this highly interesting chapter (Chapter 4), one wishes that more space could have been given to delving deeper into the texts and developing ideas around the “mobile poetics of communication technologies” (91). The idea of non-physical or virtual mobilities of producers of an accessible form of “worldliness” or practical cosmopolitanism offers a fresh perspective on these texts. In subsequent chapters, the notion of practical cosmopolitanisms is related to urban mobilities through works by Alain Mabanckou and Michèle Rakotoson (Chapter 5), and migrant mobilities in Fabienne Kanor’s Faire l’aventure (Chapter 6). Again, the strength of Toivanen’s analysis lies in the cartographies of the everyday, and quotidian acts of crossing social, economic, and cultural borders. Within the urban context the French concept of “débrouillardise” (resourcefulness) emerges as a term that encapsulates the sort of practical cosmopolitanism that is developed by the need to adapt to new or unfamiliar environments and technologies (115–9). Productively, the line of argumentation around anxieties produced by Western modernity, developed in the frst section of the study, is connected to the fragilities that necessitate “débrouillardise” as a border-crossing strategy of survival (136). The fnal section of the study, “Abject Travels of Citizens of Nowhere”, takes us to the bottom of the socio-economic ladder, covering the familiar representational terrain of clandestinely, precarity and unbelonging. This culminates in the chapter that reads “zombifcaton” as the ultimate failure of cosmopolitanism through an analysis of J. R. Essomba’s Le Paradis du nord and Caryl Phylip’s A Distant Shore (Chapter 9). Although the metaphor of the zombie is developed with reference to imaginaries of “contagious alterity” and Fortress Europe protecting itself against a “contagious blackness” (202) is evocative, this as Afropean mobility unwittingly precludes a discussion of the mobility with reference to longer histories of African descendants being European. That said, this weakness does not necessarily undermine the critical intervention made by Toivanen’s study. Overall, the book is structured, through its three sections, as complex taxonomy of cosmopolitanisms produced by class-based forms of mobility. Moreover, the fne-grained reading of an impressively broad corpus produces a multi-layered understanding of postcolonial African and Afrodiasporic cosmopolitanisms and mobilities that complicates the simplistic opposition between the privileged Afropolitan at one end of the scale, and the abject fgure of the migrant at the other. Polo B. Moji Polo.Moji@uct.ac.za University of Cape Town Cape Town, South Africa ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9109-3075 https://doi.org/10.17159/tl.v60i1.15735 Can Themba: The Making and Breaking of the In- tellectual Tsotsi, a Biography. Siphiwo Mahala. Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2022. 288 pp. ISBN 9781776147311. The biography has become a staple of Wits University Press’s catalogue over the past decade. Regina Gelana Twala, Patrick van Rensburg, Richard Rive, and Dorothea Bleek are some of the fgures who have seen their life and work be the object of sustained critical inquiry in this series of biographies. Joining this list is Siphiwo Mahala’s study of Can Themba, a “Drum Boy” best known for his short stories. A notable difference between the other biographies and this one is the relative prominence of Themba. Whilst Twala, Van Rensburg, and others are by no means unknown, Themba has a more prominent stature as an oft-anthologised, studied, and re- interpreted fgure. However, as Mahala reminds us in the introduction, “reference to [Themba’s] biographical background is scant [, and w]here reference is made to