The Experience of Return in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah: Expanding the Category of the “Cosmopolitan Stranger”

ABSTRACT

This article examines Ifemelu’s experience of return in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah in order to expand upon Esperança Bielsa’s contention that the “cosmopolitan stranger” is also embodied by certain postcolonial diasporic subjects. Bielsa refers specifically to those returnees who become agents in the transformation of their societies of origin. Under this premise, the literary analysis focuses first on Ifemelu’s emotional attitude toward a homecoming while she is in diaspora, in the US, and then moves on to explore her experience of dislocation upon return in Lagos. This leads to the identification of the figure of the stranger as returnee. The final part of the analysis examines Ifemelu’s process of readjustment in the place of origin, paying attention to her critical ways of thinking and acting as, more accurately, a cosmopolitan stranger. This article underlines, however, a major shortcoming of Bielsa’s discussion in light of studies of nostalgia – the lack of consideration of the future-oriented dimension of this emotion. Ifemelu’s homecoming shows that a feeling of nostalgia in the context of migration may result in a decision to return home as a defensive reaction to the experience of racialization, which in turn may be put to work toward cosmopolitan social change in the homeland.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. More information can be found on Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s official website, https://www.chimamanda.com/, and the independent “The Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Website”, http://www.cerep.ulg.ac.be/adichie/index.html, maintained by Daria Tunca.

2. The category “Afropolitan” has been deemed controversial as regards, among other issues, its association with contemporary Afrodiasporic writing. See Patricia Bastida-Rodríguez’s “Afropolitan in their Own Way? Writing and Self-identification in Aminatta Forna and Chika Unigwe” (2017) for a debate over whether one should use the label “Afropolitan literature”.

3. The figure of the stranger has been widely discussed within the Social Sciences and the Humanities since the publication of Georg Simmel’s essay “The Stranger” (1908). Among the reformulations of the Simmelian stranger, of particular note are Robert E. Park’s (1937) theory of the “marginal man” and Alfred Schutz’s reflections on the newcomer’s experience, which gave rise to a focus on the stranger-as-immigrant (Horgan: 609).

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the project “Strangers” (RTI2018-097186-B-I00) financed by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities, the Spanish Research Agency, and the European Regional Development Fund. Further support was provided by the R&D Programme of the Principality of Asturias, through the Intersections Research Group (GRUPIN IDI/2018/000167), and by a “Severo Ochoa” fellowship from the Principality of Asturias.

Notes on contributors

Ángela Suárez-Rodríguez

Ángela Suárez-Rodríguez is Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of English at the University of Oviedo, Spain, where she teaches in the fields of English and Gender Studies. Her PhD thesis explores contemporary Afrodiasporic women’s writing, with a focus on the protagonists’ emotional experiences throughout their migrations. She draws primarily from postcolonial affect studies. Her most recent publications include “Strangers and Necropolitics in NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names” (forthcoming, IJES) and “The Experience of Homecoming in Teju Cole’s Every Day Is for the Thief: An Investigation into the Othered “Cosmopolitan Stranger”’ (2020, JPW). She is a member of the Research Group “Intersections.”