Mediating women’s globalized existence through social media in the work of Adichie and Bulawayo (original) (raw)

This article considers the transmission of affect through social media in the recent work of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Americanah) and NoViolet Bulawayo (We Need New Names). The young protagonists, Ifemelu and Darling, both use the Internet and various social media to question the disembodied and deterritorialized spaces that digital networks potentially engender. While they at first fail to see their connections to spaces as mediated, in part because of their youthful ages, they ultimately begin to recognize both the constructed and mediated nature of the relationships at home and in the diaspora. What the young women's examples demonstrate is that the Internet or blogosphere constitute peculiar spaces of access to both homelands left behind and the host cultures. They ultimately reach the conclusion that, despite the visual, aural, and synchronous contact that computermediated communication allows, the lack of a physically present body limits the transmission of affect. The fiction of NoViolet Bulawayo and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie attends to questions of space and belonging in relation to diasporic experience in the global era. Each writer published a novel in 2013 that features new-media-driven narratives; each addresses issues of affect and access, which the influence of expanding virtual networks on social relations is making increasingly visible. In Bulawayo's We Need New Names, a teenager named Darling finds herself transported from the community of "Paradise, " Bulawayo, to "Destroyedmichygen, " which is to say Detroit, Michigan, swapping one constructed idea of home for another. In Adichie's Americanah, a young woman, Ifemelu, emigrates on a scholarship to the US, but decides ultimately that she does not want to live with a computer-mediated notion of her homeland, Nigeria. Darling and Ifemelu both use the Internet and various forms of social media to question the disembodied and deterritorialized spaces that digital networks potentially engender, and the impact these media have on the transmission of affect. While they fail at first to see their connections to spaces as mediated, in part because of their ages, they begin ultimately to recognize both the constructed and mediated nature of their relationships at home and in the diaspora.