Adichie’s Americanah, Transnational Border and the Prospects for Identity Reformation

The re-shaping of borders, triggered by globalization and many other trans-border historical events such as the fall of the Soviet Union, increase in connective technology, cyberspace interaction and global health challenges informed the growing multidisciplinary scholarship on borders that brought about the reassessment of the notion of border as more than physical demarcation. In the literary discipline, for instance, the re-imagining of border is called border poetics. Border poetics involves a critical analysis of the processes of bordering at the topographical, epistemological, symbolic, textual and temporal planes. It examines identity negotiation at the intersection of socially defined territories and foregrounds movements within and across territories in (and of) the literary text. Using the theoretical framework of border poetics, therefore, I examine Chimamanda Adichie’s Americanah as a transnational and a border narrative. By tracing the trajectory of racial border crossing, dwelling, and return by the migrant characters, I argue that Americanah involves multiple forms of bordering and border crossing. I also contend that racism is a barrier, similar to the actual border, that both separates and calls the migrant into constant mutation and negotiation of spaces.