Emotional Transitions in Contemporary Afrodiasporic Women’s Writing : Defying the Ontology of the Stranger

This book is an in-depth study of the category "stranger" as represented in four contemporary Afrodiasporic novels of female authorship: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah, Sefi Atta’s A Bit of Difference, NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names and Imbolo Mbue’s Behold the Dreamers. Examined from an interdisciplinary perspective that brings together different approaches to the figure of the stranger and Affect Theory, the plurality of experiences of estrangement, disorientation and unbelonging portrayed in these texts allows expansion upon Sara Ahmed’s investigation of "stranger fetishism" in her title Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-coloniality (2000) and, in so doing, contributes to the recent call for a more nuanced understanding of the idea of "stranger". In particular, the critical and comparative study of the different migration experiences of the protagonists reveals that, within the framework of the contemporary African diaspora to the West, "strange(r)ness" is a situated, embodied and emotional condition that depends on the politics of location and of identity from which it emerges.

This book will particularly appeal to scholars and students in the fields of Postcolonial Studies, African Diaspora Studies and Black Women’s Literature, and will also be suitable for students at graduate and advanced undergraduate levels in English Studies.