Intertextuality, Afropolitanism, and the Humanitarian Gaze in Selasi’s Ghana Must Go and Bulawayo’s We Need New Names

Contemporary African fiction increasingly emerges from transnational locations where Africa and its Diasporas are imagined across overlapping literary media spheres. This paper examines Taiye Selasi’s Ghana Must Go and NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names, as means towards exploring how inter-textual practices shape the evolving images of Africa - home and in migrancy discourse. This study foregrounds how such forms actively absorb and transform prior texts, genres and discourses. Drawing on intertextuality theory as analytical framework, especially from Julia Kristeva’s notion of the text as a “mosaic of quotations” and Africanist accounts of textual relations, the analysis adopts intertextuality as its primary analytical lens. The work adopts qualitative, interpretive method, based on a close reading of selected scenes, narrative voices and recurrent images that pervade the experiences in the texts. The analysis reveals the point that both novels resist linear migration plots by constructing dense intertextual mosaics in which Lagos, Accra, Harare, Paradise and the American suburb continually echo, ironise and echo one another. Selasi and Bulawayo simultaneously inhabit and critique Afropolitan and media scripts of crisis-ridden Africa while reworking the family saga and coming-of-age forms to expose uneven mobility, childhood vulnerability and the politics of looking at African suffering. The study argues that intertextuality as narrative convergence extends debates on Afropolitanism, African world literature and the new African diaspora, and at the same time offers a model for deeper understanding of African literary, postcolonial and diaspora realities.

Keywords: Intertextuality African Diaspora Afropolitanism Humanitarian Discourse Contemporary African Fiction

Authors

• Oladipupo, Olakiitan Abolanle
  Department of Language and Literary Studies
  Babcock University
  Ilishan-Remo, Ogun State
  oladipupo0147@pg.babcock.edu.ng
• Adam, Ezinwanyi E.
  Department of Language and Literary Studies
  Babcock University
  Ilishan-Remo, Ogun State
  adam@babcock.edu.ng