Enumerating Identities in the Certitude of African Indigeneity in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah

Abstract

African immigrants across the world are identified with their ancestors who were oppressed. They create anti-racist racism for themselves with the fear of corresponding to the stereotypes set by the dominant culture. But they end up perceiving their hybrid identities in the certitude of being black in an active state of kinship. The novel Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is a tale about being a black immigrant in the 21st century. Adichie disintegrates the promised land myth of America and proposes that the indigenous past is central to the identity of immigrants throughout her novel. This paper aims to analyze the entangled cultural experience associated with dislocation, redefinition of indigenous identity through black consciousness, formation of a hybrid identity through afropolitanism and the ‘wound of return’ while settling back in the native space in the novel Americanah. © 2022, IUP Publications. All rights reserved.