Immigration in the Confluence of Racial Implications in African Literature: A Reading of Adichie’s Americanah

Abstract

The paper is based on the issue of immigration in Adichie’s Americanah and its various racial implications in the multicultural context of America. It accordingly decodes and explains the multifaceted relationships that African immigrants have with African Americans and white Americans. The results indicate that race is still a major problem in contemporary America in spite of all the democratic laws that guarantee equality and equity between all races in America. They showed that African immigrants are sometimes discriminated on the basis of their skin color. On such basis, they are victims of stigmatization and racism on the one hand. On the other hand they are blamed and hated by African Americans for the supposed role that a minority of Africans had played during the Atlantic slave trade. The study thus revealed that immigration could negatively impact on the psychology and behavior of many African immigrants. It generally leads to assimilation, mental complexes and identity loss as seen through the character of aunt Uju and her date. However the paper concluded that Adichie’s Americanah is a novel which advocates a Homi Bhabharian Third Space of Enunciation wherein cultural and racial differences could therefore become added values of complementarity, of reinforcement and acceptance instead of stigmatization, rejection and assimilation. Keywords— Immigration, race, stigmatization, assimilation, African immigrants, America.