Transculturalism, Otherness, Exile, and Identity in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’S Americanah

Matatu 49 (2017) 386–399

brill.com/mata

Transculturalism, Otherness, Exile, and Identity in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah

Augustine Uka Nwanyanwu University of Port Harcourt, Nigeria [email protected]; [email protected]

Abstract

Today African literature exhibits and incorporates the decentred realities of African writers themselves as they negotiate and engage with multifarious forms of diaspora experience, dislocation, otherness, displacement, identity, and exile. National cultures in the twenty-first century have undergone significant decentralization. New African writing is now generated in and outside Africa by writers who themselves are products of transcultural forms and must now interrogate existence in global cities, transnational cultures, and the challenges of immigrants in these cities. Very few novels explore the theme of otherness and identity with as much insight as Adichie’s Americanah. The novel brings together opposing cultural forms, at once transcend- ing and celebrating the local, and exploring spaces for the self where identity and otherness can be viewed and clarified. This article endeavours to show how African emigrants seek to affirm, manipulate, and define identity, reclaiming a space for self where migrant culture is marginalized. Adichie’s exemplary focus on transcultural engagement in Americanah provides an accurate representation of present-day African literary production in its dialectical dance between national and international partic- ularities.

Keywords transculturalism – Adichie – identity – otherness – exile – displacement

Introduction

The post-independence period in Nigeria during the 1980s and 1990s was marked by massive economic and academic emigration to the stable and prosper- ous West (notably the usa and the uk). While the situation has been widely debated in the media and society, there have been few literary representa- tions of the experiences of those contemporary emigrations. The theme of contemporary emigration effectively entered Nigerian literature in 2013 with the publication of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah, a novel defined by its transcultural concerns. Adichie’s third novel takes us into the fleeting dwelling-places of her female protagonist Ifemelu and other young Nigerians trying to escape the absence of choice in Nigerian society in the 1990s. This paper discusses the novel’s presentation of its agenda: namely, its concern with emigration/exile and its traumatic effects on the emigrants’ lives and identities, the discourse of ‘otherness’, and how these concerns can be understood via the concept of transculturalism. The Cuban scholar and anthropologist Fer- nando Ortiz coined the term ‘transculturation’ in 1940 in the context of New World slave culture and the plantation economy; since then the concept has entered literary discourse. Ortiz used the concept to interrogate the complex transformation of cultures brought together in the crucible of colonial and imperial histories. Homi Bhabha has argued in The Location of Culture that “the discourse of colonialism is a paradoxical mode of representation.”1 Oth- erness represents disorder, the flux of re-ordering, and, for some, degeneracy. The events depicted in Americanah are traumatic and emotional; the narra- tive captures imaginatively what it means to be an exile, an economic migrant “merely hungry for choice and certainty.”2 This is because, in theme and struc- ture, Americanah lends itself to a reading according to the framework of the transcultural, for it offers the chronicle of a contact zone where American, European, African-American, and African diaspora experiences, histories, and cultures meet, merge, and, with varying intensity, engage. Adichie’s novel is, in another respect, a forceful interrogation of the state of affairs prevailing in the postcolonial era. Migration is the consequence of postcolonial malfunctions or what Achille Mbembe calls “discontinuities” and “entanglement.”3 This is what one of Adichie’s characters, Obinze, identifies as “the oppressive lethargy of choicelessness” (317).

1 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London & New York: Routledge, 1994): 94. 2 Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah (Lagos: Kachifo, 2013): 318. Further page references are in the main text. 3 Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley: u of California p, 2001): 14.

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The text imaginatively captures what it means to be an exile, an illegal migrant in an alien yet magnetically attractive Western culture. In this connec- tion, Jeff Lewis clarifies thus the concept of transculturalism:

By its emphasis on the problematic of contemporary culture, most particularly in terms of relationships, meaning-making and power formation […] transculturalism is as interested in dissonance, tension and instability as it is with the stabilizing effects of social conjunction, communication, and organization. It seeks to illuminate the various gradients of culture and the ways in which social groups “create” and “distribute” their mean- ings […]. Transculturalism seeks to illuminate the ways in which social groups interact and experience tension. It is interested in the destabiliz- ing effects of non-meaning or atrophy.4

Here Lewis identifies many elements of transculturalism. Lewis’s concept of tension or atrophy holds special interest in this work, for I hope to show how Americanah offers a compelling commentary on this point. Transculturalism is a vision of how the world is coming together and breaking boundaries and geographical barriers. By examining the marginal fissures of emigration, Adichie shows how flexibly her characters serve to comment on international relations and contemporary global politics and considers ways in which emigration can sometimes, in surprising ways, transgress geographical boundaries and connect, rather than simply challenge. Migration has served to connect peoples and cultures in the twenty-first century. Studies addressing issues of ‘otherness’,identity, and ethnicity have provided some of the most innovative contributions to recent scholarship. Adichie’s Americanah represents a new discourse in the emerging dialogue about the importance of borders on a global scale, as well as depicting the exploration of hybrid identities and diasporic experiences across national boundaries. In fact, Adichie’s novel involves a general acknowledgement of Nigeria’s relationship to an increasingly globalized world and Nigerian literature contributes to the debate about the continuing history of racism and the discourse on ‘otherness’, exile, and identity in America—a history in which Adichie’s novel has played a constitutive role, as the product of racial tensions and anxieties, both within and beyond national boundaries. In American culture, ‘otherness’ is configured and inscribed as black.

4 Jeff Lewis, “From Culturalism to Transculturalism,” Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies 1 (2002): 44, http://www.uiowu.edu/~ijes/issueone/lewis.htm (accessed 25 April 2016).

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As I have stated, Americanah explores the ways in which ‘otherness’ is constructed. One of the mechanisms operating across ethnically determined boundaries is migration. Movement into geographical territories can generate the traumatic experience of otherness. For Americanah’s Obinze, the moment of ultimate trauma comes in the uk, before the marriage for papers can be contracted with Cleotilde, the girl from Portugal:

A policeman clamped handcuffs around his wrists. He felt himself watching the scene from far away, watching himself walk to the police car outside, and sank into the too-soft seat in the back. Americanah 320

Obinze’s crime, the policeman later tells him, was that “Your visa has expired and you are not allowed to be present in the uk” (320). Secondly, it produces a keen awareness of exclusion from the mainstream culture which only invigo- rates another form of ‘otherness’, establishing different issues of exile, identity, and migration. Adichie’s novel contextualizes history and memory as trauma and as the challenge, in emigrant experience, to redefine identity in spaces of otherness. The image of traumatized immigrants held at rehabilitation facilities in the uk awaiting deportation is recalled with a sense of anguish by Obinze:

He was led into a room, bunk beds pushed forlornly against the walls. Three men were already there. One from Djibouti, said little, lying and staring at the ceiling as though retracing the journey of how he had ended up at a holding facility in Manchester Airport. Two were Nigerians. The younger sat up on his bed eternally cracking his fingers. The older paced the small room and would not stop talking. Americanah 322

In detention, Obinze “felt raw, skinned, the outer layers of himself stripped off” (323). In Americanah the concept of the transcultural is linked to postcolonial issues of economic mismanagement, imbalances of power and agency, and the disorientation experienced by Africans (mainly Nigerian) emigrating to the usa and the uk in search of opportunity. Nevertheless, distinctions are drawn, as already indicated in the African-inflected title, with its suggestion of the cultural disjecta membra and idealized fragments of the ‘American Dream’ that must be gathered into meaning by the female protagonist Ifemelu, whose fate as a resourceful woman is generally positive, whereas her old boyfriend Obinze fails in his passive and bewildered efforts to scale the walls of an

Matatu 49 (2017) 386–399 Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 03:39:14AM via free access 390 nwanyanwu anti-immigrationist uk. Obinze is thus an ‘agonist’ rather than a protagonist, his story relegated to subsidiary status, as conveyed exceptionally in the one harrowing episode of his arrival in England and otherwise negotiated through whatever Ifemelu can gather about what happens to him. Once Ifemelu had written to Obinze stating: “‘The best thing about America is that it gives you space …’ I like that you can buy into the dream … and that’s all that matters’” (492). The notion of the transcultural, which for Ortiz involved a qualified but largely successful merging of disparate experiences, evokes in Americanah predominantly the idea of ‘otherness’ and exile. It is associated with the idea of a dominant hegemonic power while the Other is inferior in power, albeit rebellious and resistant in conditions of futility. For example, Obinze’s fellow cellmate at a deportation facility tells him that “he was not going to allow himself to be deported … […] ‘I will take off my shirt and my shoes when they try to board me. I will seek asylum’” (325). Americanah focuses on the politics of colour, particularly in the case of Ifemelu’s interactions. The major task confronting the characters is how to understand and manage difference and multiple identity shifts in time and space. In Adichie’s novel, blacks, and migrants generally, constitute subaltern pres- ences located racially, socially, and economically outside the mainstream power blocs, “hungry for choice and certainty” (318) in the West. In one of her blogs, “Understanding America for the Non-American Black: American Tribal- ism,” Ifemelu deals with the issue of blackness as the Other: “American Black is always on the bottom, and what’s in the middle depends on time and place” (216). This otherness is often associated with the experience of the threshold— margins, liminality, periphery—and is characteristic of immigrant experience. It is here in America that Ginika, Ifemelu’s friend, who is of mixed race, first realizes the complex nature of her colour and identity. While driving Ifemelu to Wellson Campus, Ginika recounted her early experiences to her friend in America: “‘I didn’t know I was supposed to have issues until I came to Amer- ica. Honestly, if anybody wants to raise biracial kids, do it in Nigeria’” (146). This, like much else, is a matter of identity subject to the eye of the beholder and not under the dispensation of autonomous individuals. Ifemelu must often deny or step around her identity; Obinze must jettison his identity in England and become Vincent, using the name on another person’s health insurance to look for work. Ifemelu has to become Ngozi Okonkwo, the name on the id card Aunty Uju found for her so that she could look for work. When Ifemelu attends an interview and can hardly remember her new name, she relates the trauma of that experience to her friend Ginika, who by now knows how to buck the system:

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“You could have just said Ngozi is your tribal name and Ifemelu is your jungle name and throw in one more as your spiritual name.They’ll believe all kinds of shit about Africa.” Americanah 154

When Ifemelu gets her credit card pre-approval with her name correctly spelt on it, she feels a sense of restoration that she is finally acknowledged. Migrancy is beginning to pay off. Migration, involving navigation across socio-spatial thresholds, is also a movement across historical spaces; one leaves the baggage of one history behind as best one can in order to enter another dimension of history. In its processes and progression, historical reality is unplumbably “uncanny”5 and marked by the negotiation of alterity.6 Migration entails a transcultural move between a periphery and a dominant metropolitan centre in which the migrant must struggle through new marginalizations. Adichie’s novel is in this respect transhistorical and transcultural, tracing a liminal process that is defined by its own liminality. America offers a space in which different groups mingle, negotiate, and merge. In one instance, different cultures, Nigerian, Japanese, and Chinese, interrogate one another:

Ifemelu watched Ginika at her friend Stephanie’s apartment, a bottle of beer poised at her lips, her American-accented words sailing out of her mouth and was struck by how like her American friends Ginika had become. Jessica, the Japanese American, beautiful and animated playing with the emblemed key of her Mercedes. Pale-skinned Theresa who had loud laugh and wore diamond studs and shabby, worn-out shoes, Stephanie, the Chinese American, her hair a perfect swingy bob that curved inwards at her chin, who from time to time reached into her monogrammed bag to get her cigarettes and step out for a smoke. Hariri, a coffee-skinned and black-haired and wearing a tight T-shirt, who said “I am Indian,” laughed at the same things. Americanah 147

5 Paul Riceour, Memory, History, Forgetting (Chicago & London: u of Chicago p, 2004): 17. 6 Maria Beville, “It beggars description: Uncanny History in Joseph O’Connor’s Star of the Sea,” in Words and Worlds: Transculturalism, Translation and Identity, ed. Jopi Nyman (Joensuu: University of Eastern Finland Press, 2011): 13.

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Here in America, Ginika has integrated into new and different cultures at the same time. How easily Ginika has assimilated into American culture impresses Ifemelu:

Unlike Aunty Uju, Ginika had come to America with the flexibility and fluidity of youth, the cultural cues had seeped into her skin, and now she went bowling, and knew what Toby Maguire was about, and found double-dipping gross. Americanah 147

To Africans, to be an American citizen is an ultimate gift of freedom. For Ifemelu’s father, this is a gift that should be treasured as a refuge against fail- ure: “‘At least you are now an American citizen, so you can always return to America’” (28). For young Nigerians, America is the goal, the grail, on a quest journey. Obinze tells his mother “I read American novels because America is the future” (88). While living on Powelton Avenue, Ifemelu uses the opportunity to form a new social group. She shares her apartment with Jackie, Elena, and Allison, along with whom she is invited to parties where she undergoes new experiences. It is at one such party that she receives her first cultural les- son. Ifemelu assumes that because her roommates have invited her to the party they will pay for her meals and drinks, as is the custom back home in Nigeria. But here in America,

when the waitress brought the bill, Allison carefully began to untangle how many drinks each person had ordered … to make sure nobody paid for anybody else. Americanah 152

The hair salon run by the Malian Mariama functions in the novel as a Fou- cauldian heterotopia, a place where employees from different African countries work and different races meet and engage. For example, a young white customer, Kelsey—who has come for braids she has seen on the star Bo Der- rick, another white woman, and who is so self-possessed in her whiteness and ingenuous about all things African that she endlessly irritates Ifemelu—feels free to tell Mariama proudly:

“you couldn’t have this business back in your country, right? Isn’t it won- derful that you get to come to the us and now your kids have a better life?” Americanah 221

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It is at Mariama’s salon that Ifemelu begins to forge a new identity with her fellow Africans—Mariama and Halima from Mali and Aisha from Senegal— and it is here that the quest for integration into American culture is dramatized. Even the language spoken by the African migrants, still mid-way along the path of transculturalism, reveals their yearning for assimilation into the new culture:

The conversations were loud and swift, in French orWolof or Malinke, and when they spoke English to customers, it was broken, curious, as though they had not quite eased into the language itself before taking on a slangy Americanism. The words came out half-completed. Americanah 20

In one particular encounter, a Guinean braider in Philadelphia had said to Ifemelu: “‘Amma like, Oh Gad, Az someh’,” when what she meant was: “‘I’m like, oh God, I was so mad’” (20). For Ifemelu, an American accent meant loss of identity, and so, to regain it, she “decided to stop faking an American accent” (204). She realized that the accent she had acquired and used for too long on the day she met Cristina Tomas “had left in its wake a vast echoing space,” because it was “a pitch of voice and a way of being that was not hers” (205). This is Ifemelu’s epiphanic moment of recovery of identity, a defining moment that coincides with her relationship with her African American boyfriend Mr Blaine, “a descendant of the black men and women who had been in America for hundreds of years” (207). Blaine is an assistant professor at Yale and her relationship with him helps Ifemelu cross cultural boundaries in her social and private life and to widen the scope of her knowledge of the world: “this was no coincidence; there was a significance to meeting this man on the day that she returned her voice to herself” (210). It is perhaps in her relationship with Curt, her white boyfriend, that Ifemelu transcends social and racial boundaries to redefine her sense of self:

Ifemelu watched Mariama in the mirror, thinking of her own new Amer- ican selves. It was with Curt that she had first looked in the mirror and, with a flush of accomplishment seen someone else. Americanah 223

Friendship with Curt liberates Ifemelu; like her friend Ginika, who helps her through her spells of doubt and despondency, she has assimilated into Ameri- can culture:

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Her laugh was so vibrant, shoulders shaking, chest heaving, it was the laugh of a woman who, when she laughed, really laughed. Sometimes when they were alone and she laughed, he would say teasingly “That’s what got me.” Americanah 223

And when she and Curt finally make love, Ifemelu knows she has transcended racial and cultural boundaries in her sexual experience. She confesses that “The kiss was arousing” (226). Her sexuality is a new cultural awareness,

Ifemelu looked at Curt’s pale skin, the rust-coloured moles on his back, the fine sprinkle of golden chest hair, and thought how strongly at this moment she disagreed with Wambui. Americanah 228

At one of the asa (African Student Association) meetings, Wambui had said, about Dorothy’s Dutch boyfriend: “‘I can’t do a white man, I’d be scared to see him naked, all that paleness’” (228). This is a moment of social and cultural transcendence: “with Curt, she became, in her mind, a woman free of knots and cares” (229). It is with Curt that the world opens its gates for Ifemelu, as Curt tells her, “‘I get to show you Paris!’” (229) and Ifemelu replies in shock, jerked into the greater reality beyond the new security of the local:

“I just can’t get up and go to Paris. I have a Nigerian passport. I need to apply for a visa, with bank statements and health insurance and all sorts of proof that I won’t stay and become a burden to Europe.” Americanah 229

It is this relationship with Curt that will give Ifemelu a new look and identity. “That was what Curt had given her, this gift of contentment; of ease … she had slipped out of her old skin” (223). Curt’s world lifts her for a moment out of the life of hardship and trauma lived by other African immigrants in America. Curt widens her social circle. On most Sundays, Ifemelu meets Curt and his mother in an “ornate hotel dining room, full of nicely dressed people, silver- haired couples with their grandchildren, middle-aged women with brooches pinned on their lapels. The only black person was a stiffly dressed waiter” (231). Ifemelu reflects on her transcendence of racial and social boundaries thus:

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Wambui was working three jobs to raise the five thousand dollars she would need to pay an African American man for a green card marriage, Mwombeki was desperately trying to find a company that would hire him on his temporary visa, and here she was, a pink balloon, weightless, float- ing to the top, propelled by things outside of herself. She felt, in the midst of her gratitude, a small resentment: that Curt could, with a few calls, rear- range the world, have things slide into the spaces that he wanted them to. Americanah 236

In Maryland, Ifemelu integrates into the “small circumscribed world of Curt’s American friends” (258). But there is the shadow of trouble in paradise, as seeps through in the above passage, where Ifemelu’s measuring of her gratitude is exclusively in terms of economic security and her status in the ambience of Curt is dangerously passive, lacking agency, as though she is an accessory or plaything. (Indeed, when she confesses to Curt at one point that she had an impulsive one-night stand, Curt’s displeasure is intensified by learning that the man was white; if the transient lover had been black, Curt wouldn’t have seen him as a serious competitor and Ifemelu’s transgression as a dereliction of devotion.) It is also in Maryland, one Sunday at the Mall in White Marsh, that Ifemelu encounters Obinze’s friend Kayode, who tells her:

“I was working in Pittsburgh but I just moved to Silver Spring to start a new job.” Kayode further informed Ifemelu about her secondary school boy friend, Obinze: “we got in touch when he moved to England last year.” Americanah 258

The chance encounter with Kayode brings back to Ifemelu the world she thought she had managed to leave behind: “emotions were rioting inside her. And she found Kayode guilty for knowing about Obinze, for bringing Obinze back” (259). Whether in American cities or in England, exile is inscribed in Adichie’s novel as traumatic. When we meet Obinze in England, he is seen negotiating with three Angolans arranging the fake marriage for papers that he needs to stay, and that experience itself is traumatic as his eyes follows them:

They walked so quickly, these people, as though they had an urgent destination, a purpose to their lives while he did not. His eyes would follow them, with a lost longing, and he would think: You can work, you are legal, and you don’t know how fortunate you are. Americanah 263

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The arranged marriage with European citizens was the only means of getting legal papers for African migrants. And to help him live legally in England, the Angolans arrange for Obinze to marry Cleotilde, who has a Portuguese passport. When he meets the girl, Obinze tells her: “‘in a year I’ll have my papers and we’ll do the divorce’” (264). Obinze pays the Angolans two thousand pounds in cash, but they give Cleotilde only five hundred pounds of it after taking their cut (266). As Nicholas had told Obinze, if you come to England with a visa that does not allow you to work; the first thing to do is to “‘marry an eu citizen and get your papers. Then your life can begin’” (276). The novel deals with transcultural issues. In England, Nigerian children and other nationals mix and interact freely. Accompanying Ojiugo and her children Obinze observes how a party is held

in an echo-filled rented hall, Indian and Nigerian children running around, while Ojiugo whispered to him about some of the children who was clever at Maths but could not spell, who was Nne’s biggest rival. Americanah 280

Also in London, Nigerian men marry and have children with West Indian women. Amara, one of the Nigerian women exiles in London, expresses her worry about this kind of marriage:

“These West Indian women are taking our men and our men are stupid enough to follow them. Next thing, they will have a baby and they don’t want the men to marry them o, they just want child support.” Americanah 279–280

Indeed, Americanah resonates with such transcultural voices. African immigrants congregate in America to redefine their identity. In his welcoming talk to newly-arrived African students from Nigeria and Ghana, Mwombeki theTan- zanian student says to them:

“Try and make friends with our African American brothers and sisters in a spirit of Pan-Africanism. But make sure you remain friends with fellow Africans, as this will help you to keep your perspective. … You will also find that you might make friends more easily with other internationals, Koreans, Indians, Brazilians, whatever, than with Americans, both black and white.” Americanah 165

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As Mwombeki says, many of the internationals understand ‘otherness’ and exile better than Americans: they “understand the trauma of trying to get an American visa and that’s a good place to start a friendship” (165–166). In addition, the asa meeting in America provides a rendezvous point for students from different African countries to intermingle:

The meetings were held in the basement of Wharton Hall, a harshly lit, windowless room, paper plates, pizza cartons and soda bottles pilled on a metal table, folding chains arranged in a limp semicircle. Nigerians, Ugan- dans, Kenyans, Ghanaians, South Africans, Tanzanians, Zimbabweans, one Congolese and one Guinean sat around eating, talking, fuelling spir- its and their different accents formed meshes of solacing sounds. They mimicked what Americans told them … Americanah 163

One young Nigerian, Okoli Okafor, left Nigeria “during one of the long strikes. Now here he was a ghost of a name, about to get married in England. Perhaps it was also a marriage for papers” (268). For the emigrants, America signifies choice or living, whereas Africa represents choicelessness. To belong to Ameri- can culture for a length of years of residency was important, as Ifemelu realizes: “Once Ifemelu looked up from her phone, Aisha asked again: ‘How long you are in America?’” (27). And to gain the respect of fellow emigrants one needed to live there for many years. So Ifemelu answers, “fifteen years when it was five” (28). And, as Adélékè Adéeko has argued,

African texts that are circulated internationally deal with topics that are easily assimilated into large global concerns like feminism, and transnational migrations and their repercussion in the politics of multicultural- ism. Works that deal with national issues like development, social dislocation, problems of democratic institutions and so on.7

Americanah dwells on what it means to be black—which is: to be the Other. Dike’s colour marks him out as the Other and Dike is considered aggressive in school because he looks different. Aunty Uju relates her experience with Dike’s principal to Ifemelu: “‘Look at him, just because he looks different, when he does what other little boys do, it becomes aggression’” (201). It is precisely for

7 Adélékè Adéeko, “Trends in African Literature,” in The End of Colonial Rule: Nationalism and Decolonization, ed. Toyin Falola (Africa 4; Durham nc: Carolina Academy Press, 2007): 317.

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She looked at the photographs of these men and women and felt a dull ache of loss, as though they had prised open her hand and taken some- thing of hers. They were living her life. Nigeria became where she was supposed to be, the only place she could sink her roots in without the constant urge to tug them out and shake off the soil. Americanah 17

Therefore, buying into the American dream comes with a sense of trauma. Migration brings with it loss of identity, depersonalization, and the need self- protectively to submerge oneself in inauthenticity. Ojiugo, Nicholas’s wife, tells Obinze how harrowing getting by in the uk has been for her husband:

But this country is not easy. I got my papers because I did postgraduate school here, but you know he got his papers two years ago and so for so

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long he was living in fear, working under other people’s names. That thing can do wonders to your head, eziokwu. It has not been easy at all for him. Americanah 277

Conclusion

Adichie’s novel interrogates different issues of migration, exile, loss of identity, ‘otherness’, race relations—issues that are treated as fractious, traumatic, exclusionary, silencing. Adichie’s novel resonates with the echoes of transcultural voices, delving into issues surrounding Nigeria’s ever-expanding transcultural identity in the postcolonial world.

Works Cited

Adéeko, Adélékè. “Trends in African Literature,” African Literature Today 10 (1979): 57– 85. Repr. inTheEndof ColonialRule:NationalismandDecolonization, ed.Toyin Falola (Africa 4; Durham nc: Carolina Academy Press, 2007): 303–318. Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. Americanah (Lagos: Kachifo, 2013). Beville, Maria. “It beggars description: Uncanny History in Joseph O’Connor’s Star of the Sea,” in Words and Worlds: Transculturalism, Translation and Identity, ed. Jopi Nyman (Joensuu: University of Eastern Finland Press, 2011): 13–26. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture (London & New York: Routledge, 1994). Lewis, Jeff. “From Culturalism to Transculturalism,” Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies 1 (2002), http://www.uiowu.edu/~ijes/issue one/lewis.htm (accessed 25 April 2016). Mbembe, Achille. On the Postcolony (Berkeley: u of California p, 2001). Riceour, Paul. Memory, History, Forgetting (Chicago & London: u of Chicago p, 2004).

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