Identity Transformation among Diasporic Women Characters in Americanah

This article scrutinizes the impact of hybridity, cultural identity, and diaspora on the self-identity of African women immigrants and their interactions with others in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah (2013), and NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names (2013). The overarching argument of this article is that the African women, who immigrate to America, demonstrate self-identity through milieus, such as language, dressing, food, relationships, mannerisms, and physical appearance before and after immigration. The nature of this narrative research is qualitative and employs the post-colonial concepts of Homi Bhabha’s hybridity, Stuart Hall’s cultural identity, and William Safran’s diaspora. The African diasporic authors, namely Adichie and Bulawayo portray the women characters who emigrate from Africa to America. Americanah and We Need New Names have been selected due to the existence of the omnipresent peculiarities, such as immigration of the African women characters to America whose movements oscillate between both spaces and their identity transformation. This article tries to fill the existing gap by illuminating how the African women immigrants’ identity oscillates between both pre-immigration and post-immigration spaces, Africa and America, respectively. When African women characters engage with settings of the American diaspora, their identities change as a result. The article's findings show that there is a notable difference in how African women characters' self-identities are portrayed before and after they immigrated to America. This difference is primarily due to the fact that adoption or rejection of a new self-identity is influenced by a number of factors. It also shows how African diasporic women's altered sense of self influences how they relate to American society as well as the society of their origin.