Blogging Race, Blogging Nation: Digital Diaspora as Home in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah

Abstract

Abstract:Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, representing Ifemelu’s blogging in Americanah (2014), shows Black immigrant communities revising public discourse on intersections of race, culture, and nationality, effectively expanding conceptions of Blackness in America. Ifemelu’s blogs, Raceteenth, or Various Observations about American Blacks (Those Formerly Known as Negroes) by a Non-American Black and The Small Redemptions of Lagos are a dialogic digital literature functioning as a diasporic, communal textual space. This article focuses on Ifemelu’s blogging activity, both in the United States and upon her return to Nigeria, and explores how she creates and sustains a digital, dialogic construction of home space where “non-American Blacks” and “Nigerpolitans” can reorder their lives after transnational displacement. Americanah, a novel of migration, shows that diaspora is where constructions of identity and home are provisional and continuously constructed and Adichie represents Ifemelu’s blogs as diasporic spaces where Black migratory subjects (re)constitute identity and home. The blog platform is particularly well suited for the cultural work of the geographically dispersed diasporic community. Further, Black immigrants in dialogue with Ifemelu consider a consciousness of their racialized immigrant identities to be a prerequisite for negotiating their belonging in the United States. Ifemelu’s identity as a migratory subject and her ambivalence about her belonging in both the United States and Nigeria complicate a reading of her return to Lagos as a homegoing; her creation of a new blog, the revival of her digital diaspora, reveals her need to explore her continuously shifting identity and its relationship to the provisional nature of home.