Braiding African identities: Diaspoetic reading of black women in Chimamanda Adichie’s Americanah (2013)‎

Abstract EN

This paper offers a diaspoetic reading of the African female characters in Chimamanda Adichie's Americanah (2013).

It verifies that the African female identities in diaspora are represented in Adichie's novel through two main paradigms: hair and mobility.

Through the African hair braiding, Adichie shows that the diasporic identity is an amalgamation of the present and the past like the juxtaposition of African hair braids.

Through the paradigm of mobility, Adichie stresses the idea of the fluidity of the African diasporic identity that oscillates between the imagined and the encountered communities in a way that problematizes diasporic awareness and conflicts.

In so doing, the paper, methodologically, invests theories on diaspoetics, identity, mobility, and race that have been developed by Mishra, Singh, Hall, Brah, Cresswell, Bhabha, Safran, and Cohen and others.

The paper delineates that Adichie's Americanah shows that the cultural identities of the African female diasporic subjectivities are braided in mobility to show their oscillating experiences in both homelands and host lands to subvert and undo cultural binarism.