The “Outsider Within”: counter-narratives of the “New” African diaspora in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Americanah (2013)

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article examines how Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's novel Americanah (2013) re-imagines racial solidarity between African immigrants of the “new” African diaspora and African Americans of the “old” African diaspora. From the perspective of Patricia Hill Collins' concept of the “outsider within,” the article argues for the significance of recognizing how the “outsider within” viewpoint featured in Adichie's counter-narratives offers a cultural insider a “valid source of knowledge” for interrogating cultural hegemony in the US. In advancing this thesis, the article analyzes two aspects of the novel. The first is the novel's protagonist, Ifemelu, and her anonymously authored blog, which contains cultural commentary on race relations in the US from the perspective of an African immigrant, or, what the author terms, a “non-American Black.” Through her blog, Ifemelu rhetorically signals racial solidarity with African Americans, but the protagonist also divulges how average white American readers assume that all blacks regardless of national origin share in the same experience of blackness. The second aspect of this article analyzes how the novel in general oscillates between fostering racial solidarity between American Blacks and non-American Blacks and critiquing African immigrants as a new model minority. This oscillation suggests that the novelist remixes diasporas, as Adichie's Americanah shuttles between employing tropes of the “old” African diaspora while crafting a narrative of the “new” African diaspora. The article concludes that this remixing of diasporas situates Americanah within the “old” African diaspora as much as (if not more so than) the emerging literary tradition of the “new” African diaspora.