Tracing the Transnational: Scaling (neo)imperial realities through the body in Chris Abani’s fiction

Abstract

Current thinking in materialist postcolonial and world-literary studies shows the realities of empire to be ongoing and mutable, and the local–global interface to be among the most vexed issues in these discussions. What has been overlooked thus far are the ways in which the body has reemerged in cultural production as a receptor to and cipher for these frequently abstracted planetary vectors. This essay analyses the construction of “transnational bodies” in and across a selection of Chris Abani’s fiction, highlighting how the artful embodiment of his globalized protagonists facilitates a scaling from global (neo)imperialism to its intimate bodily effects. The protagonists of Becoming Abigail, GraceLand and The Virgin of Flames trace routes between Lagos, London and Los Angeles. In Becoming Abigail (2006), Abigail’s ritualistic scarification of her body is read as an act of reclamation in response to her experience as a victim of international sex-trafficking from Lagos to London. Her trauma and embodied reaction are discussed alongside GraceLand’s (2005) Elvis, a resident of Lagos’s Makoro slum, who dresses up as his namesake to entertain foreign tourists. Finally, the essay turns to the protagonist of The Virgin of Flames (2008), Black, a cross-dressing mural artist in Los Angeles, who is the child of a Catholic Salvadoran mother and atheist Igbo father. Comparing these protagonists, I emphasize how their bodies index both their relation to the global system and their resistance to it through imminent bodily inscriptions and costume, arguing that Abani’s “transnational bodies” illustrate the multiscalar forces of (neo)imperialism as well as envisioning various strategies of intimate self-assertion.