“You’re black”: Transnational perceptions of race in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah and Andrea Levy’s Small Island

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis essay analyzes how race—and, specifically, the idea of “blackness”—circulates in two contemporary novels. In reading Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah and Andrea Levy’s Small Island comparatively, this essay argues that the term “black” is not a stable signifier of race, but materially and geographically contingent. The transnational mobility of the two female protagonists in these novels uncovers the variableness in perceptions of racial differences. This slippage reveals the connections between racialized and national identity and demonstrates the necessity of linking the two, while simultaneously relying on race as way to demarcate the limits of national belonging.