'Reconfiguring Others': Negotiating Identity in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Americanah (original) (raw)
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The Negotiation of Bicultural Identity in Chimamanda Adichie's Americanah
Horizons Littéraires Revue du Centre de Recherche sur la Critique Littéraire Africaine, 2020
This article uses Adichie’s Americanah as the backdrop for an exploration of the hectic life of African immigrants in Western countries. It examines the Nigerian writer’s treatment of intersubjective relationships between the immigrant and communities in the receiving society. It discusses the intricacies and tribulations of the “self” meeting and living with the “other”, in the diaspora and back into Africa. The study first discloses, through the postulates of Julia Kristeva, in Strangers to Ourselves, and Paul Ricoeur in Oneself as Another, the quest for a better future, disenchantment and disillusionment of immigrant characters, in the new space. Then it probes the heartwrenching efforts to put in dialogue their heritage culture and the one in the new social context. In a final analysis, the study discusses the strategies invented by the latter, to translate culture differences, transcend xenophobic attitudes, synthetize heritage and receiving cultures, and assume their “bi-identity”. Keywords: immigrant, identity, alterity, biculturalism, adichie.
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.
The Conundrum of Ethnic Discrimination and Identity Crisis in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie s Americanah
World Journal of English Language, 2024
The issue of Racial discrimination has emerged as a pressing concern worldwide in general and in the United States in particular in recent times, posing a significant challenge to human rights. Racial discrimination constitutes a grave violation of human rights, which encompasses a broad spectrum of human rights violations, including the adoption of discriminatory practices, the marginalization of domestic issues, and the unjust targeting of ethnic or religious minorities, refugees, and immigrants, often branding them as criminals, either intentionally or inadvertently (Smith & Johnson, n.d.). In this context, the present study aims to examine the facet of ethnic and racial discrimination that is meted out against the African immigrant community in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie"s Americanah. This study tries to investigate the instances of racial discrimination that are orchestrated on the protagonist Ifemelu and her deep longing for ethnic identity after she migrated from Nigeria to America. This research paper also examines the myriad forms of racial politics and myths of sexism and racism prevalent in the American discourses in the light of Intersectionality theory.
International Journal of English Literature and Social Sciences, 2019
The paper is based on the issue of immigration in Adichie's Americanah and its various racial implications in the multicultural context of America. It accordingly decodes and explains the multifaceted relationships that African immigrants have with African Americans and white Americans. The results indicate that race is still a ma jor problem in contemporary America in spite of all the democratic laws that guarantee equality and equity between all races in America. They showed that African immigrants are sometimes discriminated on the basis of their skin color. On such basis, they are victims of stigmatization and racism on the one hand. On the other hand they are blamed and hated by African Americans for the supposed role that a minority of Africans had played during the Atlantic slave trade. The study thus revealed that immigration could negatively impact on the psychology and behavior of many African immigrants. It generally leads to assimilation, mental complexes and identity loss as seen through the character of aunt Uju and her date. However the paper concluded that Adichie's Americanah is a novel which advocates a Homi Bhabharian Third Space of Enunciation wherein cultural and racial differences could therefore become added values of complementarity, of reinforcement and acceptance instead of stigmatization, rejection and assimilation.
RACISM IN CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE'S AMERICANAH: A CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS
Since the slavery and colonial eras, racism and ethnic issues, power and class relations between individuals, entities, communities and dominance have been the major issues in the world. Racism enacts superiority of a race over another, and this act affects people not only on interpersonal level but also through the broader structures of society most notably in the system of education, justice, media, policing, immigration and employment as well as through hate activities and government policies. This study portrays how Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is able to manipulate her choice of words in describing the stigma that a society has attached to individuals because of their colour. Fairclough and Dijk's Critical Discourse Analysis approaches guided the analyses. CDA is an indispensable tool for the analysis of any discourse that portrays social practices. The study concludes that discrimination is not only done by mainstream or the in-group members of a society but the out-group members also engage in this act of disassociation which is caused by the migration of people from one country to the other either for better opportunities or for educational purposes as portrayed in the novel.
Writing a New Reputation: Liminality and Bicultural Identity in Chimamanda Adichie’s Americanah
SAGE Open
Turner's liminality describes a phase in social life wherein the confrontation between activity which has no structure and its structured results produces in men their highest pitch of self-consciousness. Ifemelu is one of the faces of America's growing youth immigrants whose liminal state is suspended between social structures in a state of continuous transition. The article examines Chimamanda Adichie's modern mythic characters as positive models of Nigerian immigration responding to negative racial stereotypes. The essay analyzes how Americanah, as a fiction of reputation management, renegotiates image rights of immigrants and minorities on a humanistic template engendering social compact of respect and mutual understanding. Adichie's redemptive narrative stresses the bicultural fix of economic exiles, affirming vision of a new cultural space for Africans at home and in the Diaspora. Focusing on the survival and agency of Black immigrants, Adichie advocates immigrants' proud avowal of their bicultural identity in a neo-colonial space.
The struggle to pretend and belong: Americanah’s case
RihumSo : Revista de investigación del Departamento de Humanidades y Ciencias Sociales, 2021
In this essay, it will be analyzed the postcolonial novel Americana (2013) written by author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. The lives of main and secondary characters will be explored in order to demonstrate how, living in a foreign country, they will have to adapt themselves to the American and England life pretending to be something they are not to find a sense of belonging there. Racism, the language used by these characters and identity are some topics to deal with within this essay.
Far Western Review
This paper looks into Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah as a postcolonial text. Using the Bhabhaian constructs of “mimicry,” “hybridity” and “the third space,” this paper argues that Adichie’s narrative portrays how the coming together of cultures induces “mimicry” of the cultural norms of the seemingly dominant culture. Owing to this “mimicry” the mimicking characters develop a “hybrid” identity characterized by “ambivalence.” This paper also argues that the location/ site of mimicry and consequent development of hybrid identity are not conditional upon physical migration, or moving beyond the borders of one’s homeland. The tendency to look up to the supposedly dominant culture can prevail within the confines of natives’ own society as well, which is perhaps an indication of the post-colonial society still reeling under the continued colonial influence. Whatever maybe the location of “hybrid” characters, “ambivalence” invariably crops up in their identity. Although ambivalence ...
The ambivalence of Multiculturalismin ChimamandaNgozieAdichie's Americanah
2019
This paper sets out to investigate multiculturalism as a major cultural tenet in Chimamanda's Ammericanah; to identify and analyze the various sub sets of multiculturalism and proceed to establish the post-colonial implications of multiculturalism to the various migrant subjects presented in the novel. The novel,being a migrant novel and especially of the digital age is replete with a multiplicity of issues concerning multiculturalism. This paper will establish that multiple settings that transcend countries and continents,a blend of characters from various cultural backgrounds, conversations and exchange of ideas over the internet superhighway (hyperculture), multilingualism/ multivocality, and Afropolitanism are elements of multiculturalism in the novel. The post-colonial theory will be used to question the above elements of multiculturalism towards demonstrating the ambivalent nature of multiculturalism in the novel.
The Construction of Blackness in "Americanah" by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
The tradition of telling stories about Africa has not been doing justice to the complexity of the continent. In 2009, Nigerian-born writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie gave a memorable TED-Talk called “The Danger of a Single Story“, where she reminds her audience that, as early as the XVI century, travelers engaged in a rhetoric meant to legitimize imperialist interests by portraying Africans in a dehumanizing way. They were, in the words of traveler John Lok, “beasts who had no houses“ (Adichie 06:35- 07:00). Probably the most prominent account of dehumanizing portrayals of Africans is Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novel Heart of Darkness, about which Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe writes that it is making Africa “a place where man’s vaunted intelligence and refinement are finally mocked by triumphant bestiality“. In light of her observation that telling stories about other people means to exercise power, I am reading her 2013 novel Americanah as an attempt to correct the one-sided story about Africa. I show how Ifemelu, the main character of Americanah, is part of a multi-faceted narrative about being African, precisely because she deconstructs the “essential black subject“ (Hall 443), an identity she is subjected to in the United States of America. By the construction of Ifemelu's Blackness I mean that her identity results from white society imposing oppressive constraints on her, most notably on her affect. By refusing what I will call the “affective identity“ projected onto her, she complicates Blackness and refuses the victimhood of being the “racialized Other“, becoming an Afropolitan character. I then offer a short overview of the concept of Afropolitanism, while bearing in mind that “[t]he right question is not so much What or who are the Afropolitans? But what work can Afropolitanism do to illuminate and enhance our understanding of Africans in and of the world today?“