Moving beyond the generic boundaries of autobiographical writing, this paper contemplates the extent to which textual forms emerging in the online space of the internet can serve as a platform for reflecting on and constituting an autobiographical sense of self, drawing together text, paratext and context in the new forms the online space permits. The paper focuses on Taiye Selasi’s online writing, reading in conjunction different forms of texts such as articles, interviews and talks. While Selasi is perhaps most famous for her essay ‘Bye-Bye Babar (Or: What is an Afropolitan?)’ (2005) and her debut novel Ghana Must Go (2013), both of which have been celebrated and critiqued for their reflections on belonging, I propose that we turn our attention to the writer’s online presence in order to grasp the different ways in which she reflects on the concept of belonging in her writing.
My reading of Selasi’s articles, interviews and talks will suggest that they operate as ‘co-texts’ which are tied together through intertextual and self-reflexive moments, asking what it means to belong to the African diaspora in the twenty-first century. These moments assist the writer in contextualising the issues of belonging that are raised in each text and which point to broader social and political structures that lie beyond the text itself. Relying on the counterdiscursive capacity of postcolonial autobiographical narratives, the intertextual and self-reflexive moments featuring in each of the texts pivot on a discursive layer of meaning which questions and complicates normative politics of belonging, for instance by frequently alluding to an autobiographical sense of self that accentuates belonging as a personal and emotional attachment to place which extends beyond citizenship and nationalism.