Liminality, Diasporic Melancholia and 'Small' Redemption. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Americanah

Research Paper (postgraduate) from the year 2018 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 8,5, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, course: Ethnic Studies, language: English, abstract: In the present paper I embed Ifemelu's migration to America in the broader diaspora of Africans to the United States which is undertaken in search of more favourable education and career prospects. I suggest that diasporans could potentially comprise the par excellence hybrid identity that Homi Bhabha has championed in the development of his postcolonial theory of identity formation. I argue that Americanah poses a substantial challenge to hybridity and mimicry-based cultural identities by accentuating the very limitations of these models; namely, that they seriously overlook the psychic trauma caused by the loss of cultural authenticity due to the disconnection from the motherland and by the identity reinvention undertaken in the host country. My thesis posits that Ifemelu is affected by diasporic melancholia. Adapting Sigmund Freud's concept of melancholia in the context of diaspora theory I seek to demonstrate that the inarticulate loss of the motherland and the position inbetween cultures disorients and traumatises the subject. I argue that the feelings of ceaseless restlessness and vague yet constant dissatisfaction that the subject experiences point to the trauma of identity loss, a psychic wound that only the physical return to the motherland can heal.

Aglaia Varlami holds a Bachelors degree with first-class honours from the School of English, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. She is currently pursuing a Masters degree in English and American Studies at the same university. Her thesis seeks to examine the manner in which trauma is represented in contemporary British drama, focussing on the work of playwrights Sarah Kane (Crave 1998) and Lucy Prebble (The Sugar Syndrome 2003). She was a presenter at the Second International Symposium of Students of Croatian, English and Italian Studies: Easy to S(t)ay? which was held in Split, Croatia in October 2017. Her research interests include modernist and post-modernist fiction, contemporary drama, phenomenology, deconstruction, feminist, gender and queer studies.