The Making of the ‘New Man’ in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah

Abstract

This paper examines the making of a ‘new man’ character in Adichie’s Americanah and discusses how such a moulded man integrates himself in society and deals with other gendered worlds. The discussion shows how much Adichie in the representation of ‘new man’ character in her novel rejects the naturalisation of the unchangeability of the male subject by dramatizing how much the male’s enactment of masculine-self is contingent to the orientation one gets. In this paper, I establish that that Adichie’s representation of progressive ‘new man’ character in her novel does not only serve as a role model for ideal alternative masculinity, but also re-invents a space necessary for a progressive female character to belong in hetero-patriarchal setting of the novel. Although the categorisation of modes of masculinity in this paper begins with Connell’s binary of hegemonic and subordinate masculinities, the objective of the discussion is beyond such fixity. My interest in this paper is precisely on the sets of masculinity which, although they divert from the hegemony, the difference or the deficit of hegemonic masculinity does not suggest the inferiority. The paper borrows Swain’s (2006) “personalized masculinities” to refer to softer and transgressive modes of masculinities that are rebellious against the naturalisation of heteronormativity.