Narrating the Diaspora Dissertation

Narrating the Diaspora Transmigration and Socio-Cultural Imaginaries in 21st Century Nigerian Literature Dissertation zur Erlangung des Doktorgrades der Philosophie an der Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz eingereicht von Maximilian FELDNER, MA am Institut für Anglistik Erstbegutachter: Ao. Univ.-Prof. Mag. Dr.phil. Martin Löschnigg Zweitbegutachterin: Ao. Univ.-Prof. Mag. Dr.phil. Maria Löschnigg 2017 Table of Contents Introduction 1 1. Contexts: The Nigerian Diaspora and its Literature 1.1. The New African Diaspora and the Novelists of the Nigerian Diaspora 13 1.2. Nigerian Diaspora Literature in the Context of African Literature and Cultural Nation Building 31 1.3. Nigerian Diaspora Literature and Postcolonialism 53 1.4. The Nigerian Diaspora on the Global Literary Marketplace 75 2. A Life Elsewhere: Stories of Migration and Rooted Hybridity 2.1. Leaving Nigeria: Stories of Migration and Transmigration 97 2.2. Exploring the Limitations of Afropolitanism in Taiye Selasi’s Ghana Must Go 115 2.3. Second Generation Nigerians in England: Helen Oyeyemi’s The Icarus Girl and the Negative Experience of Hybridity 131 2.4. The Concept of Transmigration in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah 147 3. News from Home: Literary Nation Building and Dystopian Representations of Nigeria 3.1. Returning to Nigeria: Teju Cole’s Every Day is for the Thief and Sefi Atta’s Everything Good Will Come 165 3.2. Biafra and Nigerian Identity Formation in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun 183 3.3. City of Stories: The Lagos Imaginary in Chris Abani’s GraceLand and Sefi Atta’s Swallow 205 3.4. The Prison of 1990s Nigeria: Helon Habila’s Waiting for an Angel 225 Conclusion 245 Bibliography 251 Introduction Over the first two decades of the twenty-first century an impressive body of work by Nigerian novelists has emerged. The novels by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie have found considerable success, and especially her latest, Americanah (2013), has created a stir in Anglo-American literary circles. At the same time, Teju Cole and Taiye Selasi published their novels, Open City (2012) and Ghana Must Go (2013) to great acclaim and attention, while Helen Oyeyemi has made a name for herself by prolifically publishing one popular novel after the other. The ground for what can be seen as a resurgence of Nigerian literature was prepared in the early 2000s, when novelists such as Helon Habila (Waiting for an Angel, 2002; Measuring Time, 2007), Chris Abani (GraceLand, 2004), Sefi Atta (Everything Good Will Come, 2005; Swallow, 2010), and Adichie (Purple Hibiscus, 2003; Half of a Yellow Sun, 2006) wrote a number of remarkable books. This generation of Nigerian novelists has achieved “near instant canonization” (Adesanmi and Dunton, 2005, p. 11), and together with other Nigerian authors including Ike Oguine, Chika Unigwe, Okey Ndibe and Segun Afolabi they have contributed to what critics Pius Adesanmi and Chris Dunton call a “phenomenal revival of the Nigerian novel” (Adesanmi and Dunton, 2008, p. viii).1 Living in Europe and the United States while retaining strong connections to Nigeria, these novelists are members of the new African diaspora. At the heart of their literature lies the fundamental tension between living in the diaspora while being drawn back to Nigeria: I decide that I love my own tranquillity too much to muck about in other people’s troubles. I am not going to move back to Lagos. No way. I don’t care if there are a million untold stories, I don’t care if that, too, is a contribution to the atmosphere of surrender. I am going to move back to Lagos. I must. (Cole, 2014, p. 69) In this expression of indecision about whether he should return to Lagos or not, the protagonist of Teju Cole’s Every Day is for the Thief (2007) succinctly captures a dilemma that, usually to lesser degrees, informs much of these novelists’ work. Nigeria exerts an undeniable gravitational pull on their characters, a pull that is offset by their difficulties and struggles of actually living in the country. The resulting tension is a typical, perhaps even constitutive feature of contemporary Nigerian literature. 1 There are also no signs that this trend of internationally visible Nigerian literature is going to abate any time soon. On the contrary, several young Nigerian novelists have published notable novels since 2015, such as Chigozie Obioma (The Fishermen, 2015; shortlisted for the 2015 Booker Prize), Chinelo Okparanta (Under the Udala Trees, 2015), A. Igoni Barrett (Blackass, 2015) and Chibundu Onuzu (Welcome to Lagos, 2017). 1 This dissertation presents a survey of twenty-first century anglophone Nigerian narrative literature. To account for the fact that the most prominent representatives of this literature are located in the global North while either they or their parents were born in Nigeria they are subsumed under the heading of ‘Nigerian diaspora literature’. The major aim of this dissertation is to explore the way the Nigerian diaspora novelists, especially Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Sefi Atta, Helon Habila, Chris Abani, Helen Oyeyemi, Taiye Selasi, Teju Cole and Ike Oguine, render literary the various experiences of the Nigerian diaspora both in Nigeria and the global North.2 Together, these novelists represent one of the most vital and interesting forces of contemporary literature production, the study of which is relevant in at least three respects. First, contemporary anglophone African literature is generally a relatively under- researched field. Even though Nigeria’s literary output has received more attention than that of most other African countries most comprehensive studies of Nigerian literature either predate the emergence of Nigerian diaspora literature, such as Wendy Griswold’s extensive study on the Nigerian novel, Bearing Witness (2000), or merely mention it in passing (see Childs, 2006; Irele, 2009; Emenyonu, 2006; and Eckstein, 2007). However, an increasing interest in current Nigerian novelists such as Adichie, Abani and Oyeyemi is evident in the considerable number of academic articles that have been published over the last few years. These articles either attempt to grasp this new literature theoretically (Adesanmi, 2006; Adesokan, 2012), deal with one particular novelist (Andrade, 2011; Mason, 2014; Ouma, 2014) or focus on a specific element in the works of several writers, such as the figure of the child (Hron, 2008) or the function of the storyteller (Krishnan, 2014). Many of the articles are collected in special issues of relevant journals, such as the May 2005 issue of English in Africa with its focus on new Nigerian writing (Adesanmi and Dunton, 2005) or the Summer 2008 issue of Research in African Literatures, which was dedicated to Nigeria’s Third Generation Novel (Adesanmi and Dunton, 2008). The raised attention that this literature receives can also be seen in the fact that since 2008 the yearly review issue of The Journal of Commonwealth Literature has been including a section on West African literature (Hungbo, 2009). In addition, there exist a few collections and book-length studies on one or two individual authors, such as Atta (Collins, 2015) and Adichie and Abani 2 I have adopted the terms ‘global North’ and ‘global South’ as more useful than the monolithic and misleading terminology of ‘west’ and ‘non-west’. As metaphorical constructions ‘global North’ and ‘global South’ highlight globally unequal relations and instead of representing polarizing opposites they refer to more complex and intricate models of global circulation (see Brydon, 2013, p. 435). 2 (Tunca, 2014). So far, however, there has been no book-length study dealing with a broad selection of current Nigerian novelists collectively under the comprehensive heading of Nigerian diaspora literature. Secondly, being a literature about diaspora, migration, hybridity and transculturality, Nigerian diaspora literature fictionalizes the increasingly connected world that we inhabit in the wake of globalization, a world in which more people have been on the move, uprooted, and living between cultures than ever before. Hence, it is a literature that raises questions of cultural identity and lives in movement, questions that doubtlessly have great relevance for our lives today. At the same time, as a literature of and about Nigeria it features voices from a part of the world that is seldom considered in any complex way in discourses of the global North. Together, the novels present complex, intricate and detailed portrayals of Nigeria. Thirdly, it is therefore undoubtedly a literature of today. Its authors thematise the experience of living in our times and make understandable our age. It is especially the simultaneous feeling of displacement and belonging that is closely related to the phenomenon of globalization, which is expressed in this literature. In sum, Nigerian diaspora literature is located at the intersection of globalisation and postcolonialism, and thus constitutes a paradigmatic field of representation of our age. The novelists of the Nigerian diaspora divide their time and story-telling attention between the United States, the United Kingdom and Nigeria. Accordingly, it is not surprising that two dominant areas of concern in their literature are experiences of migration and diaspora on the one hand, and representations of Nigeria on the other. In a sense, the novelists and many of their characters are representatives of what Kwame Anthony Appiah calls “rooted cosmopolitanism”, namely a cosmopolitanism that is partial and attached to narrower and more local

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