American Dreams and Black Identity in the New African Diaspora: Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie’s Americanah and Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.53154/Oltreoceano37Keywords:
New African Diaspora, Chimamanda Nogzi Adichie, Yaa Gyasi, black identity, ethnic literatureAbstract
This essay examines how the New African Diaspora challenges and expands the notion of Black identity through the heritage, histories, and the African immigrants dreams of America and through which they measure and deal with reality. Thus, in the works of C.N. Adichie and Y. Gyasi, blackness is a fluid, collective identity, able to cross time and space renewing itself each time.
Sogni americani e identità nera nella nuova diaspora africana: Americanah di Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie e Homegoing di Yaa Gyasi
Il saggio esamina i modi in cui la nuova diaspora africana mette alla prova ed espande il concetto di identità nera attraverso l’eredità culturale, le storie e i sogni dell’America degli immigrati Africani e attraverso i quali misurano e affrontano la realtà. Così, nei romanzi di C.N. Adichie e Y. Gyasi, l’identità nera è fluida e collettiva, capace di attraversare spazio e tempo rinnovandosi ogni volta.
Downloads
References
Adichie, C. N. (2009): The Danger of a Single Story. TED Talk. Retrieved from https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_ngozi_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story/transcript?language=en
Adichie, C. N. (2013): Americanah. New York: Anchor Books.
Baldwin, J. (1965.03.07): The American Dream and the American Negro. The New York Times. Retrieved from
Bryce-Laporte, R. S. (1972): Black Immigrants: The Experience of Invisibility and Inequality. Journal of Black Studies, 3, 1, pp. 29-56.
Cullen, J. (2003): The American Dream: A Short Story of an Idea That Shaped a Nation. New York: OUP.
DuBois, W. E. B. (2015): The Souls of Black Folk, 1903. New Haven & London: Yale UP.
Fanon, F. (2008): Black Skin, White Masks, 1952. London: Pluto Press.
Gilroy, P. (1993): Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London & New York: Verso.
Goyal, Y. (2017): We Need New Diasporas. American Literary History, 29, 4, pp. 640-663.
Gyasi, Y. (2016): Homegoing. London: Penguin Books.
Hsu, R. Y. (1996): Will the Model Minority Please Identify Itself?: American Ethnic Identity and Its Discontents. Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies, 5, 1, pp. 37-63.
Johnson, V. M. S. (2013): Meddling the American Dilemma. Race, Migrations, and Identities from an Africana Transnational Perspective. In A. M. Kraut & D. A. Gerber (Eds.), Ethnic Historians and the Mainstream. Shaping America’s Immigration Story (pp. 157-174). New York: Rutgers UP.
Kiah, A. (2019): Black Myself. In Our Native Daughters, Songs of Our Native Daughters. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Folkways.
Landry, A. (2018): Black is Black is Black?: African Immigrant Acculturation in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah and Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing. MELUS, 43, 4, pp. 127-147.
McCoy, S. (2017): The Outsider Within: Counter-narratives of the New African Diaspora in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah (2013). Journal of the African Literature Association, 11, 3, pp. 279-294.
Motahane, N., Nyambi, O. & Makombe R. (2021): Rooting Routes to Trans-Atlantic African Identities: The Metaphor of Female Descendancy in Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing. African Identities, 19, 1, pp. 17-30.
Pierre, J. (2004): Black Immigrants in the U.S. and Cultural Narratives of Ethnicity. Identities: Global Studies on Culture and Power, 11, 2, pp. 141-160.
Wilderson III, F. B. (2020): Afropessimism. New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation.
Wright, M. M. (2004): Becoming Black: Creating Identity in the African Diaspora. Durham: Duke UP.
Wright, M. M. (2015): Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology. Minneapolis & London: University of Minnesota Press.
Zeleza, P. T. (2009): Diaspora Dialogues: Engagement Between Africa and Its Diasporas. In Isidore Okpewho & Nkiru Nzegwu (Eds.), The New African Diaspora (pp. 31-58). Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
The authors undertake to comply with the following conditions, which are considered accepted at the time of submission of their contributions.
The sending of a text implies that it is unpublished and not submitted to be published elsewhere.
1. If accepted, the author shall confer on the publisher the right to publish and distribute it both in paper form and in the online electronic edition. The published articles will be downloadable and made available in open access.
2. Provided that it correctly indicates that the first publication took place in the journal Oltreoceano. Rivista sulle migrazioni the author has the right to: a) reproduce the article in separate extracts or collected in a volume; b) publish the article on their personal website or teaching site provided that these sites are of a non-commercial nature; c) deposit the article in online archives of a non-commercial nature, linked to the institution they belong to or as part of projects for the non-commercial dissemination and open access of scientific works.
The use of contributions by third parties, for commercial or otherwise unauthorized purposes, is not allowed. The publisher declines all responsibility for the unauthorized use of the material published in the journal.