Rethinking Globalisation through Afropolitanism in Chimamanda Adichie’s Americanah

Abstract

The quest of this paper is to illuminate and celebrate Adichie’s Americanah as a text that opens our eyes to the challenges of African Diaspora in America. The need to offer different latitude of identity is aptly captured in Taya Zelase’s 2011 essay titled Afropolitanism, which has become a daring resurrection of debates that surrounds the ambiguity of contemporary African Diaspora. The need to analyse and interpret Afropolitanism as an emerging diaspora theory, which speaks to Africans diaspora was best located in the works of Adichie Chimamanda titled Americanah (2013). Indubitably, Adichie rebukes the dilemma of African Diaspora while at the same breath celebrates Africa as the ultimate space of identity and belonging. Locating itself within Afropolitanism theory as an emerging theory is a robust yardstick of interpreting textual response to the ambiguities of contemporary African Diaspora, the paper uses a close reading of Americanah to identify diasporic experiences, and how the characters negotiate them. By opening an honest conversation around the questions of belonging and identity, this study is instrumental in shedding light on the opaque sense of identity and the need for examining how modern African Diaspora negotiates the dehumanising aspect of Racism.