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ABSTRACT
This article examines how Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's novel Americanah (2013) re-imagines racial solidarity between African immigrants of the “new” African diaspora and African Americans of the “old” African diaspora. From the perspective of Patricia Hill Collins' concept of the “outsider within,” the article argues for the significance of recognizing how the “outsider within” viewpoint featured in Adichie's counter-narratives offers a cultural insider a “valid source of knowledge” for interrogating cultural hegemony in the US. In advancing this thesis, the article analyzes two aspects of the novel. The first is the novel's protagonist, Ifemelu, and her anonymously authored blog, which contains cultural commentary on race relations in the US from the perspective of an African immigrant, or, what the author terms, a “non-American Black.” Through her blog, Ifemelu rhetorically signals racial solidarity with African Americans, but the protagonist also divulges how average white American readers assume that all blacks regardless of national origin share in the same experience of blackness. The second aspect of this article analyzes how the novel in general oscillates between fostering racial solidarity between American Blacks and non-American Blacks and critiquing African immigrants as a new model minority. This oscillation suggests that the novelist remixes diasporas, as Adichie's Americanah shuttles between employing tropes of the “old” African diaspora while crafting a narrative of the “new” African diaspora. The article concludes that this remixing of diasporas situates Americanah within the “old” African diaspora as much as (if not more so than) the emerging literary tradition of the “new” African diaspora.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the African Literature Association for providing a platform to present my work and receive substantial feedback from participants, especially Tsitji Jaji who chaired the panel in which I presented. Entitled “Does Blackness Matter to African Literature?” the panel and respondents provided critical feedback and encouraged me to develop my presentation further for this publication. I would also like to thank the editors of this special issue, MaryEllen Higgins and Lucie Viakinnou-Brinson, who provided incredible support for completing the final draft. Any shortcomings are entirely my own. With gratitude, I thank all of you.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. I draw my understanding of racial hierarchies and racism from sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva's “Rethinking Racism: Towards a Structural Interpretation” (Citation1997). In this essay, Bonilla-Silva theorizes racism as a “racialized social system” that includes economic, political, social, and ideological components.
2. For more on Adichie's cosmopolitanism, see David Mikailu and Brendan Wattanberg's “My Name Will Not Be Lost: Cosmopolitan Temporality and Reclaimed History in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's ‘The Headstrong Historian’” (2015) and Connor Ryan's “Defining Diaspora in the Words of Women Writers: A Feminist Reading of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's The Thing Around Your Neck and Dionne Brand's At the Full and Change of the Moon” (2014).
3. For more on Adichie's approach to Afropolitanism, see Rocío Cobo Pinero's “Americanah: Translating Three Countries into English and the Afropolitan Consciousness” (2016); Miriam Pahl's “Afropolitanism as Critical Consciousness: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's and Teju Cole's Internet Presence” (2015); and Jennifer Wawrizinek and J. K. S. Makokha's edited anthology of essays Negotiating Afropolitanism: Essays on Borders and Spaces in Contemporary African Literature and Folklore (2011).
4. For more on Afrocentrism in Adichie's novels, see Aretha Phiri's “Expanding Black Subjectivities in Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Americanah” (2016); Brenda Cooper's A New Generation of African Writers: Migration, Material Culture & Language (2013); Chielozona Eze's Postcolonial Imaginations and Moral Representations in African Literature and Culture (2011); and Evan Mwangi's Africa Writes Back to Self: Metafiction, Gender, Sexuality (2010).
5. Adichie's attitude towards Nigerian nationalism was recently featured in her essay “Nigeria's Failed Promises” (2016) featured in The New York Times. Also see Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's “Things Left Unsaid” (2012), featured in the London Review of Books for a review of Chinua Achebe's memoir There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra. For more on the presence of Nigerian nationalism in Adichie's work, see Hamish Dalley's “The Idea of ‘Third Generation Nigerian Literature’: Conceputalizing Historical Change and Territorial Affiliation in the Contemporary Nigerian Novel” (2013) and Angharad Closs Stephens’ The Persistence of Nationalism: From Imagined Communities to Urban Encounters (2013).
6. See Katherine Hallemeier's “‘To Be from the Country of People Who Gave’: National Allegory and the United States of Adichie's Americanah” (2015).
7. The Act banned the use of immigration quotas by the federal government as well as “opened the borders to non-white nations and cleared the way for not only a redefinition of ‘white’ America, but also of ‘black’ America” (“The Newly Black Americans” 59). It “literally changed the face of America” (Chishti, Hipsman, and Ball, Citation2015) because the act effectively “ended an immigration-admissions policy based on race and ethnicity, and gave rise to large-scale immigration, both legal and unauthorized” (Migration Policy Institute).
8. Also see Tom Gjelten's “The Immigration Act that Inadvertently Changed America” (2015) and Timothy J. Hatton's “United States Immigration Policy: The 1965 Act and Its Consequences” (2015).
9. These novels often carry the hallmark of war trauma (especially genocide and civil warfare) and engage Western readers to “share” in these experiences. The inherent problem that lies with these historical novels is that readers too often assume postcolonial trauma fiction to be in solidarity with other postcolonial writers. In other words, readers expect postcolonial trauma fiction writers to share in a collective experience of trauma. See Hamish Dalley's “The Question of ‘Solidarity’ in Postcolonial Trauma Fiction: Beyond the Recognition Principle” (Citation2015).
10. In Articulate While Black: Barack Obama, Language, and Race in the U.S. (2012), Alim and Smitherman mark the importance of “style-shifting,” which occurs when a speaker “shifts” in her use of language depending on context. In other words, the speaker's use of language is fluid, dynamic, and contextually bound (112). Commensurate with style-shifting is “code-switching” (58). A speaker may “codeswitch” when navigating multiple language communities. Both “style-shifting” and “code-switching” allow for users of non-standard English discourses to navigate the battlefield of unaccented American English, as accented English is sociopolitically fraught.
11. Diversity workshops and multicultural talks are often underpinned by a liberal multiculturalism ethos, which emerged in the post-1960s era. See Jodi Melamed's Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism (2011) for a more robust historical representation of both the aftermath of liberal multiculturalism and also its antecedents.
12. For more on white liberalism's intersection with racism, see Rebecca Aanerud's Maintaining Comfort, Sustaining Power: Narratives of White Liberalism (2015); Shannon Sullivan's Good White People: The Problem with Middle-Class White Anti-Racism (2014); Barbara Foley's Breaking the Code of Good Intentions: Everyday Forms of Whiteness (2009); and Jane Hill's The Everyday Language of White Racism (2008).
13. Much has been said on Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart (1958) and its place within the postcolonial literary canon. See David Borman's “Playful Ethnography: Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart and Nigerian Education” (2015); Françoise Ugochukwu's “Things Fall Apart: Achebe's Legacy, from Book to Screen” (2014); and Chima Anyadike and Kehinde A. Ayoola's Blazing the Path: Fifty Years of Things Fall Apart (2012).
14. For more on the field of social cognitive psychology and feminist affect studies, see especially Marianne Liljeström and Susanna Paasonen's Working with Affect in Feminist Readings: Disturbing Differences (2010); S. T. Fiske and S. E. Taylor's Social Cognition: From Brains to Culture (2008); and Sara Ahmed's The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2004).
15. In “Barack Obama, the 2008 Presidential Election and the New Cosmopolitanism: Figuring the Black Body” (2012), Linda Selzer unpacks how Obama (as a political figure) is placed simultaneously between a hyper-racialized discourse and an ostensibly color-blind rhetoric that purports the US to be post-racial. Also see Ralina Joseph's “Imagining Obama: Reading Overtly and Inferentially Racist Images of our 44th President, 2007–2008” (2011).
16. My use of the word “choice” here is not intended to imply an uncritical stance to US exceptionalism. Rather, I use “choice” as a descriptor because Adichie's narrator employs the same term and presents the same dichotomy – that Nigeria did not present those choices to Ifemelu. Put simply, my employment of “choice” is intended to describe the protagonist's motivation for migrating to the US.
17. See, for instance, Isabel Wilkerson's The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration (Citation2010) and Douglas A. Blackmon's Slavery by Another Name (2008). Both authors capture the historical construction of the racial caste system and how it impacted the development of mass incarceration and the perception of black criminality in the US.
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Shane A. McCoy
Shane A. McCoy is an instructor in the department of English at Tennessee Technological University. His research focuses on Africana women's literature, critical and feminist pedagogies, social justice, and pedagogies of empowerment. His courses have focused on contemporary transnational literature, women of color and black feminisms, Hurricane Katrina, and comedy as social and cultural critique. He is currently at work on a book manuscript that weds contemporary Africana women's literatures to feminist affect studies.