Diasporic Experience, Gender Dialogue and the Dynamics of Cultural Encounter in Chimamanda Adichie’s Americanah and Sefi Atta’s A Bit of Difference

This study analysizes the works of two contemporary Nigerian writers, namely: Americanah by Chimamanda Adechie’s and A Bit of Difference by Sefi Atta. The two writers are women of Nigerian descent, who have lived in Nigeria at some point in their lives as well as the West. Their works of fiction cover a range of diverse themes and genres from historical fiction and politics to sexuality, gender and mapping of women’s agency in urban spaces. This study is situated within the growing scholarship in new African and Nigerian Diaspora through the prism of cultural and literary diaspora. African Diaspora theorists such as Kim Butler and Isidore Okpewho, and gender theorists such as Chandra Mohanty (1984) and Caroline Henderson (2010), are used as aids to analysing this paper. The two novels are of critical interest because of the problematic representation of women in first generation writing in terms of agency, voice and gender. The modern voices as seen in the two women are premised on revolutionary aesthetics, aimed at changing the status quo. The thus paper examines how the two writers contribute to the global discourse of gender, intercultural politics, and the dynamics of diasporic cultural identities. The paper concludes that the works of the two diasporic West African women writers use the mutating position and identity of the diasporic African woman to explore gender imbalances and dynamics in both Western and African spaces.

Keywords: Nigerian Diaspora Diasporic Literature Gender Imbalance Cultural Encounters

Authors

• Chika Roseline Nwaedozie
  Department of English, School of Languages,
  FCT College of Education, Zuba, Abuja
• Edet Ita Onukak
  Department of English, School of Languages,
  FCT College of Education, Zuba, Abuja