Email Scams, Nollywood Movies, and the New African Literary Novel: Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani’s <em>I Do Not Come to You by Chance</em> in the Post-Global Age

Abstract

This article demonstrates that Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani's novel I Do Not Come to You by Chance dialogues with a multiplicity of texts and discourses at literary and popular registers. It explores affiliations between African literary narratives about 419 and the popular narratives that migrate through minor and informal transnational networks of production and consumption in Africa and the diaspora. The article analyzes the textual strategies Nwaubani's novel adopts to negotiate between literary and popular publics, paying close attention, on the one hand, to the novel's entanglements with local, popular narratives and, on the other, to the strategies of literariness it takes up. The aim is to describe, in particular, the novel's intersections with and rewriting of the idioms and aesthetics so pronounced in popular texts, such as Nollywood and Ghanaian movies, as well as its playful and poignant reimagining of the tropes and forms adopted in 419 fraud emails.