Could you please teach me? Could you please teach me what is this mean in simple words. As a trope, little restraint has been attached to its uses. As a disabling virus within literary discourse, Africanism has become a way of talking about and way of policing matters of class, sexual license, and repression, formation and exercises of power. Through the simple expedient of demonizing and reifying the range of color on a palette, American African makes it possible to say and not to say, to inscribe and erase, to escape and engage, to act out and act on, to historicize and render timeless.