Americanah: Translating Three Countries into English and the Afropolitan Consciousness (original) (raw)
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Lies and Pretense…………………………………………………………. 3.6 The Narrative Strategy in Travelers………………………………………………. 3.7 The Protagonist's relationships with other characters………………………………. 4 Conclusion………………………………………………………………………………. Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………… 'Race doesn't really work here. I feel like I got off the plane in Lagos and stopped being black.' (Americanah; p. 586). 'I looked at the unsmiling faces, thinking how ironic history was, that they'd come for succor here, escaping persecution and apartheid, this place that a few decades earlier had been roiling with its own brand of persecution under the Nazis. How did they cope with the food, the new language, with being visibly different, with the bone-chilling winter of exile?' (Travelers; pp. 15-16). 'They are also places where, as a Nigerian raised in England, I'm forced to watch the European and African mindsets collide in a way that equally splits my loyalty and disdain towards both' (Looking for Transwonderland; p. 5).
AFROPOLITANIST CONSTRUCTS IN TAIYE SELASI’S GHANA MUST GO AND CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE’S AMERICANAH
Tobi Idowu , 2018
Migrant literature has continued to gain increasing prominence in literary production due to what has been described as postcolonial impulse in the contemporary Third World literature. This is, in part, reflective of the experiences of the Third World countries in the face of increasing globalisation; and also, in part, reflective of the increasing residency of literary artists and critics of the third world countries in the West. Meanwhile, Afropolitanism falls into the general category of migrant literature. However, what sets it apart from other migrant literary discourse is its radical shift in thematic focus with regards to home, identity and in the construal of nationality. Afropolitanism has its provenance in the now seminal essay of multinational writer, Taiye Selasi (2005) titled, ByeBye Barbar or What is an Afropolitan? of whose major thematic thrust is the refusal to pander to the thematic expectations of a typical African in the diaspora. This study therefore engages with the ideas that underpin the thematic preoccupations of the Afropolitans. It adopts the qualitative approach for its methodology as two texts of veritable Afropolitan tilts, Taiye Selasi’s Ghana Must Go and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah have been selected as primary analytical texts in order to explore the Afropolitanist constructs. The study also makes use of postcolonial theory as its theoretical framework. This study, thereafter, is able to foreground, through the exploration of such diasporic markers as race, identity, home, exilic feelings and cultural intermingling, that Afropolitan writings not only seek to problematize the conventional standards of engagement within the migrant literature but also to push forward into the front burner unheralded but legitimate ideas surrounding migrant experiences.
International Journal of Literature, Language and Linguistics
Postcolonial theory focuses on addressing gaps that are encountered when dealing with literary works or contexts that are minor or peripheral. It explores ways in which dominated or colonized culture can adapt tools of the dominant discourse to fight against its political or cultural dominance. Postcolonial studies serve as a useful tool for translating texts from one language to another. One has to be conversant with the approaches used by postcolonial writers to be able to appreciate their texts and eventually translate them. This paper used the methodology of textual analysis to examine portions of the selected works of four postcolonial African writers; namely, Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Efua Sutherland and Ola Rotimi, to bring out key strategies by which these writers decolonized the minds of their African audience. The main decolonizing strategies discussed include adaptation, vernacularization and pidginization. Based on the findings from the analyses, the paper proposes so...
Human Affairs , 2018
The article analyzes two novels of migration by Nigerian women authors in the context of Afropolitanism: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Americanah (2013) and Sefi Atta's A Bit of Difference (2013). It is argued that Afropolitanism obscures the reasons why migration from Africa to the West has been increasing in the decades since independence, rather than decreasing. In comparing the two novels, the article focuses on empathy towards and solidarity between fellow Nigerians, which has been seen by Nigerian philosopher Chielozona Eze as crucial for building African civil society and functional state.
‘Le monde s’effondre? Translating anglophone African literature in the World Republic of Letters’
Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 2012
This article considers translations of African texts from English to French in the context of recent conceptualizations of world literature. Translation is a key mechanism, dynamic and metaphor in world literature. However, its idealized connotations should not distract from the material realities of a process governed by uneven structures of production and reception. Two cases are illustrative: Amos Tutuola’s L’Ivrogne dans la brousse (The Palm-Wine Drinkard) (trans. Raymond Queneau 1953; 1952) and Chinua Achebe’s Le Monde s’effondre (Things Fall Apart) (trans. Michel Ligny 1966; 1958) published respectively by Gallimard and Présence Africaine. The rapturous mainstream reception of Raymond Queneau’s stylistic appropriation of Tutuola is here contrasted with the subdued reception of Achebe’s text in France in the late 1960s. The translators’ spectral presence in text and paratext is key to understanding the position of the translated texts in relation to the aesthetic, political and commercial stakes of their publishing contexts. Colonial and postcolonial book history thus confirms the material instability and relationality of any totalizing model of a world literary system and the methodological limits of a singular abstract concept of world literary time or space.
Ethnotextual mental translation and self-translation in African literature
Ars Aeterna
Interest in African literature and translation is relatively new; it mainly emerged in the 1990s with the postcolonial turn in translation studies, under the influence of the cultural turn, the polysystems theory and the “Manipulation School”. Many African writers describe themselves as intercultural translators; they hover over the following questions: Is it a form of selfdenigration not to use one’s mother tongue as a medium of literary creation? How can their literary creations account for their postcolonial experience in the languages of former colonizers? Can these languages render the specificities of their distinct cultural worldviews? The linguistic choice made by African writers is hence highly political because it involves a compromise that rests on power relations. Their writing often involves a sort of translation from Source Language (SL) to Target Language (TL) whether through ethnotextual mental translation or self-translation.
2022
Migration and mobility stories have received scholarly attention in contemporary African literary criticism lately. Scholarship on African migration to the developed world has mainly focused on migrants' experience in the West with regards to race and identity and a continual propensity towards criticizing Western border closing policies. This paper, in a close reading and critical discourse analysis maneuver, explores two new generation Nigerian writers namely Teju Cole and Noo Saro-Wiwa within postcolonial theoretical framework. It purports to examine new immigration narratives in which migrants return 'home' to write about their place of origin as they have become transnationals calling attention on mayhem that this place experiences as opposed to nationalist or Pan-Africanist ideologies, of bygone era, expressed primarily in Negritude writings. Both considered narratives show that Cole and Saro-Wiwa use magical realism and travelogue form to depict the starkly mundane life condition in Nigeria with failed transportation system, socio-political corruption, and overwhelming fatalism due to not only the ruled but the ruler's failure to change their living conditions. Rather, they tend to surrender and participate in 'mutual zombification.' These writers' thematic inclination displays their pessimism and skepticism regarding Nigeria's improvement to become a place with acceptable living standards as they leave their readers to hopelessly contemplate the mess that the narratives aesthetically depict.
2022
This article analyses two novels published by two writers of Nigerian-Igbo descent: Buchi Emecheta's Second-Class Citizen (1974) and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Americanah (2013), examining the connections between the authors' and their female characters' movements and mobilities. This essay first compares the two fictions and the different migration experiences of the two novels' main protagonists, Adah and Ifemelu, in the United Kingdom and the United States, respectively. Second, it shows how these texts can be read as what Carole Boyce Davies describes as "uprising textualities" (1997), that is, narratives of women's resistance, reassertion, renewal and rethinking that simultaneously celebrate women's creativity. Writing, indeed, plays a pivotal role for both the novelists and their characters. It is not only a tool to explore their personal experiences in the Global South and the complex relationships between their travels and the spaces of marginality in which they live, but it is also a political instrument to denounce social inequalities, challenge hegemonic representations, and Eurocentric and masculine epistemologies. This paper aims to demonstrate how the "South" also exists in the geographic North and how the novelists and their respective fictional characters, through writing, voice their "creative uprisings" and simultaneously negotiate their complex and multifaceted identities and subjectivities in different times and spaces.
The Journal of Communicative English, 2018
ABSTRACT One of the major challenges of postcolonial African literature has been its transnational shift in the age of globalization. Globalization with its attendant increase in migrations continues to witness an influx of human beings from diverse parts of the world into Europe and America. Predictably, the largest numbers are often from the less developed countries of the world. The outcome of these movements has been transformations and integrations in different ways. It is on this premise that Chika Unigwe’s On Black Sisters’ Street and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah are two literary texts to discuss the multifaceted and intertwined combination of experiences that afflict and characterize transnational trajectory and the complex dynamics of diaspora existence. The paper argues that Africans are challenged by the instability arising from the quest for survival in the new world as a result of imperialism. Hitherto, the Nigerian immigrants are depicted as grappling with difficulties and identity crisis. The paper concludes that Unigwe’s and Adichie’s transnational engagement underscores the perception of the West as an El Dorado of sorts. Keywords: Migrancy, Diaspora, Identity.