Abstract
In contemporary diasporic fiction from Africa, much attention has been given to representations of the complexities that characterize the lived experiences of Black African immigrants living in transnational spaces like the United States and the United Kingdom. Most of the criticism on these works has mainly focused on the physical and psychic wounds of migration experienced by these immigrants as they negotiate their identities in diasporic spaces. However, more recent literary works from the African continent are confronting and “undoing” hegemonic value systems, practices and social constructs that have historically restricted Black African immigrants to the margins of their host countries in the Global North. This paper explores the ways in which Chimamanda Adichie’s novel, Americanah (2013), reimagines the tropes of migration, identity and belonging by contesting historically oppressive and exclusionary migratory sites. In this diasporic novel, characters inhabiting migratory spaces are reinvented as transnational subjects who exercise unique forms of agency which transcend the liminality associated with diasporic spaces. A close analysis of the novel reveals Adichie’s use of decolonial thinking as a strategy to subvert racial stereotypes that have historically supported structures of dominance and oppression. In Americanah, counternarratives and interracial relationships are used as tools for critiquing the insidious presence of coloniality in migratory spaces, thereby giving characters opportunities to regain agential control within exclusionary and oppressive structures.
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
COLONIALITY, DIASPORA, MIGRATION, IDENTITY, DECOLONIALITY
