A life Elsewhere?: Afropolitanist Reading of Race Struggle, Identity and Home in Chimamanda Adichie’s Americanah

Globalization and global movements have had significant impacts on the kinds of literary works that have been produced by writers of African descent in the 21^st century. There is currently the pervading popularity of diasporic writing, a kind which has come to be associated with works produced by a community of immigrant writers, either with common ancestral homelands or shared immigration experiences. Many of these works have painted African immigrants as leaving their home countries because of desperate situations. Many have also presented the narratives of double- trouble for Africans who fled their homes only to be confronted with more drastic situations in their country of immigration. This paper however explores how Adichie’s Americanah expands the scope of diasporic fictions beyond fixation with the physical and economic conditions surrounding migration. Anchored on the theory of Afropolitanism popularized by Taye Selasi, this paper concerns itself with Adichie’s Textual representation of the myriad of challenges that confront African immigrants in their struggle for self-establishment in America and Europe. The paper concludes that, with Americanah, Adichie gives a fundamental voice to the African immigrants’ entanglement within the complex web of race relations in America and Europe and raise a psychological question of the meaning and importance of “home” and Identity”.