Department of English

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Browsing Department of English by Subject "Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi, 1977-"

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    Focalization schemas, transnational formations and social remittance in the works of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2020-03) Maritim, Eric Cheruiyot; Bangeni, Nwabisa; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This work contextualises Chimamanda Adichie’s novels and collected short stories within the area of migrant transnationalism, arguing that this is an inherent feature of the content and form of the texts. Adichie’s narrative are pre-occupied with motif of migration that, in the contemporary context, is characterised by what David Harvey terms time-space compression. This has facilitated spatio-temporal disjunctures as a result of migrants’ simultaneous embeddedness in multiple cross-border localities. This work therefore contributes to the burgeoning research on transnationalism but gives it a literary dimension by narratologically exploring how border-crossing narratives which trace experiences of migrants and non-migrants, implicate transformations in worldviews of individual migrants and how these idiosyncratic transformations have far-reaching collective implications in their points of origin. This is operationalised through analytic mining of how the presented non-migrants’ and migrants’ encounters are focalised in the narratives at the points where they emigrate, where they immigrate as well as the emergent in-between spaces they inhabit as transnational persons. In tandem with seizing upon how these encounters are focalized, the postcolonial notion of liminality is adopted to account for the processes by which the characters in these transnational locations generate various agentic capacities that are trafficked to their countries of origin as social remittance. Towards this end, it reasons that, with the transnational space conceived of as a liminal space rife with possibilities for socio-politically innovating, migrant characters are veritable agents of socio-political transformation in the communities where they originate and to which they are still emotively attached and committed. Despite this optimism in approach to their transformative function, however, the less salutary implications of their transnational locations are considered.
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    Precarious unmoorings : women’s voices in the Anglo- and Lusophone literature of Adichie, Chiziane and Mohamed
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2023-03) Lim, Rose Joanna; Steiner, Tina; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.
    ENGLISH SUMMARY : African women’s writing has firmly established itself in the arena of postcolonial literatures. It has long walked on from the clamour of the great African language debate on the use of Europhone versus Afrophone languages in African fiction. This dissertation studies the enigma of unmoored African women’s articulations from the perspectives of narratives written in Anglo- and Lusophone mediums. Unmoored, ‘orphaned’ women’s language has taken on a life of its own and disengaged from its colonial-era Europhone sensibilities. It has unobtrusively established unmistakable footholds in the realms of African literature. I argue that the women-centric unmoored language in the narratives of African women writers exist within the ambits of culture and society and yet demonstrate vagabond tendency to wander and engage with further potentialities of articulation. My dissertation examines selected novels from the literary repertoires of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Paulina Chiziane and Nadifa Mohamed respectively. The main impetus for my study is to engage with the phenomenon of unmoored African women’s writing and the manner in which the narratives reflect and create registers in which the experience of women takes centre stage. In particular, attention is drawn to the multivalent articulations of the texts’ women protagonists and other supporting characters, and the routes through which they subversively express themselves in hostile patriarchal settings. The core chapters of this dissertation identify three main strands of such women-centric unmoored articulations, namely the role of imposed and strategic silence in Adichie’s narratives, a reliance on collective expression in Chiziane’s work and geo-poetic spatial contemplations in Mohamed’s texts. The variegated nuances of these different narrative features draw out the diverging approaches to articulation in selected narratives of these three African writers. Writing from Lusophone Africa, Chiziane offers an additional contrast to the Afro-Anglo-perspectives of Adichie and Mohamed. My dissertation contends that these women-centred narratives amplify the heterogenous stances of African women, whose voices do not conform to societies’ prevailing tenets.