Hustler Masculinity in the Nigerian E-fraud Novel

ABSTRACT:This article identifies the figure of the e-fraud hustler as a contemporary iteration of an African discourse of masculinity. Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani's I Do Not Come to You by Chance and Chuma Nwokolo's Diaries of a Dead African represent men's engagement in the e-fraud hustle as a neoliberal gamble to monetize their masculinity. As men's pecuniary agency is threatened and limited by the vagaries of neoliberal capitalism, it is equally mediated by yet another paradigm of neoliberal capitalist ideology, namely, (the criminal redefinition of) entrepreneurship. To be a man thus necessitates an ever-shifting performance of terminal and complicit masculinity, a paradoxical development in which men take risks to circumvent economic exclusion by imitating the expediencies of neoliberal capitalism. The novels register this money-governed sense of masculinity through gender discourses and narrative strategies that resist fixed constructions of African masculinity in favor of an ever-vigilant logic of its contingency and plurality.