| dc.description.abstract | ABSTRACT
The socio-cultural patterns of the twenty first-century have increased people’s mobility across the planet. The cultural complexities and interactions that these combined factors generate seem to foster an emerging transcultural orientation. Literature is a mirror of the society and these patterns have not eluded literary writers. Both physical and metaphoric manifestations of dislocation exist in literary works. By way of characterisation and manipulation of a variety of stylistic resources, literature provides resourceful ways for describing ourselves or altering our vocabularies for a variety of purposes. Thus, literature gives us the chance to enlarge our sensitivity and our imaginations. Against this backdrop of denationalisation, new arrangements of form and content in novels that have adapted to a changed cultural and social paradigm need to be investigated. There is need for interrogation of literary works, Adichie’s novels in particular, which fall within this purview to determine the socio-cultural dynamics of displacement and demonstrate how émigrés navigate their way through new cultural environments as they strive to attain a cultural equilibrium. This is the critical burden of this investigation. The specific objectives of the study are: to explore the socio-cultural circumstances that compel characters of Adichie’s novels to move out of their traditional localities; demonstrate how the émigrés of Adichie’s novels negotiate the cross-cultural complexities of their new worlds; and determine how the émigrés of Adichie’s novels establish transcultural citizenship. This study benefits from a multi-dimensional construct of critical hybridity, a conceptual framework comprising ideas drawn from postcolonial studies and dialogism. Premium is placed on the ideas of Fanon, Said, Bhabha, Epstein and Bhaktin. The study takes an analytical research design. The three novels, Half of a Yellow Sun, Purple Hibiscus and Americanah, constitute the study population for this research. This homogeneous sample represents one third of Adichie’s literary publications. These three novels have been purposively sampled. The novel form, on account of length, accords a literary writer all the freedom they need to explore issues extensively; it is bereft of the structural limitations of condensed forms like poetry and short stories. The three novels are also set in the same fictional universe. Close reading is adopted as the primary data collection method. This study concludes that dislocation is both physical and transcendental. Physical and transcendental émigrés wade through new cultural environments and struggle for belonging in such culturally fractured worlds. In their endeavour to carve a cultural niche for themselves, they embrace transcultural citizenship. This study enriches the body of critical studies on displacement, migration and transculturalism. The results of this study demonstrate the nature and content of transcultural outputs that are more attuned to the cosmopolitan and pluralistic sensibilities in the contemporary society. | en_US |
