The post-independence period in Nigeria during the 1980s and 1990s was marked by massive economic and academic emigration to the stable and prosperous West (notably the USA and the UK). Adichie’s exemplary focus on transcultural engagement in Americanah provides an accurate representation of present-day African literary production in its dialectical dance between national and international particularities. This article endeavours to show how African emigrants seek to affirm, manipulate, and define identity, reclaiming a space for self where migrant culture is marginalized. The novel brings together opposing cultural forms, at once transcending and celebrating the local, and exploring spaces for the self where identity and otherness can be viewed and clarified. Very few novels explore the theme of otherness and identity with as much insight as Adichie’s Americanah. New African writing is now generated in and outside Africa by writers who themselves are products of transcultural forms and must now interrogate existence in global cities, transnational cultures, and the challenges of immigrants in these cities. National cultures in the twenty-first century have undergone significant decentralization. Today African literature exhibits and incorporates the decentred realities of African writers themselves as they negotiate and engage with multifarious forms of diaspora experience, dislocation, otherness, displacement, identity, and exile.
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