“I Love This Country, but Sometimes I Not Sure Where I Am”: Black Immigrant Women, Sexual Violence, and Afropessimistic Justice in New York v. Strauss-Kahn and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah

Abstract

I argue that when a high-profile legal case of sexual violence, New York v. Strauss-Kahn, and a novel centering on black immigrant women as the victims of a sexual assault, Americanah, are juxtaposed, we see that black immigrant women manufacture their own approaches towards justice. I call these approaches to justice “Afropessimistic justice.” Using Jared Sexton’s broad definition of Afropessimism as a black suspicion of hope, the women’s approaches can be read as Afropessimistic because they have the potential to both heal and harm themselves. The question becomes: is the self-harm worth the possibility of justice? Aside from a healing/harming justice frame, both cases feature black immigrant women for whom taking back control over their own narratives of assault is a key part of each justice project. And what’s especially striking about this project is that the survivors of assault are selective about the new modes of technology that they and their allies choose to enact these alternative forms of justice, to regain control over the narrative of their assaults. The blogosphere and televised news are the specific justice-making spaces under examination in this article. Black immigrant women use a combination of new and old technologies to craft, supplement legal justice and/or define justice for themselves. Black immigrant women in particular use these technologies to take back control over the narratives of their assaults. The internet and/or mediated spaces function and/or malfunction for immigrant women of color in particular ways. Most importantly, this article demonstrates how these digital/televised spaces provide paradoxical avenues of justice for the survivors. The novel and the legal case respectively illuminate the advantages and disadvantages of two modalities: television and the black blog. For Nafissatou Diallo and the protagonist of Americanah, Ifemelu, television and the black blog are platforms that function as safeguards against the compounded trauma that the legal system can pose. At the same time that TV and the black blog provide hope of justice, they raise new forms of harm for black immigrant women who have survived sexual violence. These recent technologies therefore offer paradoxical brands of justice for black immigrant women in the 21st century.