Abjection and the fetish: Reconsidering the construction of the postcolonial exotic in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun

Abstract

This article seeks to reconsider the notion of the exotic within postcolonial studies, using the case study of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun and its central relationship between Englishman Richard, and Nigerian Kainene. Viewed primarily as a subtype of orientalism, exoticism, as a process, has been presented as a unidirectional phenomenon of action from a dominating metropolitan subject onto the passive Other. This article argues that, because exoticism functions as a type of metonymy, such a perspective on it is necessarily underdeveloped. Instead, exoticism functions through metonymy, as a means of fabricating unstable links of identification between its subject and object. Because this metonymic relationship is central to the subject’s maintenance of identity, exoticism is continually threatened by abjection, where the dismantling of the metonymic chain results in a conflation of subject and object status. Because of the importance of the fetishized object of exoticism, the process as a whole must be viewed as dispersive and multi-dimensional in its effects, re-centralizing the exotic Other within its framework.