The Narratives of Migration and Diaspora in Modern African Literature: the Case of Chimamanda ADICHIE’s Americanah (original) (raw)
Related papers
English Linguistics Research, 2019
Adichie's Americanah is one of the African novels whose characters and settings traverse cultures. The author herself is a product of trans-cultural education and uses this medium to draw global attention to the difficulty faced by migrants. Most of the African diaspora characters work hard to gain visibility in a culture that obliterates the personality of migrants irrespective of gender and academic achievements. Adichie's representation of the characters captures much of the realities told by migrants navigating and negotiating life outside their countries of origin. Through personal will to get a better life outside their home countries, the characters engage in some self-effacing work to acquire permanent residency so that they can return home for acclaim. The author uses local colour and synaesthesia to remind the characters of their roots and the rhetorics of scatology to portray the hostility of the receiving country.
From the Local to the Global: A Critical Survey of Exile Experience in Recent African Poetry
Nebula
The question of exile in contemporary African literature remains central to the understanding of its people. Of particular interest is the place of poets of the second generation in the depiction of this phenomenon. Although the paradigm of generational configuration is admittedly flexible, this paper seeks, nonetheless, to explore the perception of a few selected poets of the second generation from Anglophone Africa in order to illustrate the multidimensional approach to the engagement of the theme. By so doing, the paper is also concerned with the construction of home through its images, on the one hand, and on the other, the dissection that lies between home and exile in countries of destination in the West. The paper also hopes to explore the frustration that goes with the experience and the dilemmatic situation in which its victims are caught. It will show at the same time how from an initial standpoint of essentially internal sociopolitical and economic factors in regions and countries, things have gradually moved in the past three decades or thereabouts into an exponentially actuated and leveling stage in which globalization-as seen in its present fashion-has accelerated the spate of African citizens' vulnerability to exile, especially to the West.
Transnational Migration, Identity, and the African Literary Experience Volume 43 Issue 1
Ufahamu:A Journal of African Studies, 2022
This essay seeks to examine transnational migration by looking primarily at 20 th- century writers historicizing the concept of the ‘post-colonial’ and pointing to its development as captured in their writing. In the paper, transnational migration is viewed as the movement of persons across national boundaries where the migrants live their lives across borders, participating simultaneously in social relations that embed them in more than one nation-state, and in which there is a process by which such immigrants forge and sustain multi-stranded social relations that link together their societies of origin and settlement. Going by this definition, all major African writers (such as Ayi Kwei Armah, Chinua Achebe, Ben Okri, and the like), with the possible exception of Ayi Kwei Armah, are transmigrants. This is because their migration took place—is taking place—within fluid social spaces and identity-forming contexts, which are constantly reworked through their simultaneous connectedness to more than one society. In this case, the term that better expresses this situation is ‘post-colonial’. Although there is a growing community of African writers and artists living in the West, it is uncertain how they might influence the events, politics, and cultural discussions within their original homeland. The conclusion is that it is not clear how the transmigration of African intellectuals could help shape the identity and tenor of the post-colonial African literary experience, which has been historically and culturally shaped by the impact of the African colonial experience. In this sense, then, recent migration by the African literati (specifically novelists) to the West is only the latest version of the pull that Europe and the United States of America exert on African post-colonial identity. This is not likely to slow down in the foreseeable future.
Transnational Migration, Identity, and the African Literary Experience
Ufahamu: A Journal of African Studies, 2022
This essay seeks to examine transnational migration by looking primarily at 20 thcentury writers historicizing the concept of the 'post-colonial' and pointing to its development as captured in their writing. In the paper, transnational migration is viewed as the movement of persons across national boundaries where the migrants live their lives across borders, participating simultaneously in social relations that embed them in more than one nation-state, and in which there is a process by which such immigrants forge and sustain multi-stranded social relations that link together their societies of origin and settlement. Going by this definition, all major African writers (such as Ayi Kwei Armah, Chinua Achebe, Ben Okri, and the like), with the possible exception of Ayi Kwei Armah, are transmigrants. This is because their migration took place-is taking place-within fluid social spaces and identity-forming contexts, which are constantly reworked through their simultaneous connectedness to more than one society. In this case, the term that better expresses this situation is 'post-colonial'. Although there is a growing community of African writers and artists living in the West, it is uncertain how they might influence the events, politics, and cultural discussions within their original homeland. The conclusion is that it is not clear how the transmigration of African intellectuals could help shape the identity and tenor of the post-colonial African literary experience, which has been historically and culturally shaped by the impact of the African colonial experience. In this sense, then, recent migration by the African literati (specifically novelists) to the West is only the latest version of the pull that Europe and the United States of America exert on African post-colonial identity. This is not likely to slow down in the foreseeable future.
Transculturalism, Otherness, Exile, and Identity in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah
Matatu, 2017
Today African literature exhibits and incorporates the decentred realities of African writers themselves as they negotiate and engage with multifarious forms of diaspora experience, dislocation, otherness, displacement, identity, and exile. National cultures in the twenty-first century have undergone significant decentralization. New African writing is now generated in and outside Africa by writers who themselves are products of transcultural forms and must now interrogate existence in global cities, transnational cultures, and the challenges of immigrants in these cities. Very few novels explore the theme of otherness and identity with as much insight as Adichie's Americanah. The novel brings together opposing cultural forms, at once transcending and celebrating the local, and exploring spaces for the self where identity and otherness can be viewed and clarified. This article endeavours to show how African emigrants seek to affirm, manipulate, and define identity, reclaiming a space for self where migrant culture is marginalized. Adichie's exemplary focus on transcultural engagement in Americanah provides an accurate representation of present-day African literary production in its dialectical dance between national and international particularities.