AFROPOLITAN IDENTITY AND AFRO-DIASPORIC OTHERNESS IN SELECTED AFRICAN NOVELS

This paper examines selected African novels on the new African diaspora. It sheds light on the Afropolitan identity and the rhetoric on Afro-diasporic Otherness in a cultural contact situation as an underlying thematic thrust in the novels. It adopts a qualitative research method, using content analysis as its research design. The selected novels analysed are Chimamanda Adichie's Americanah, Helon Habila's Travellers, Yaa Gyasi's Homegoing, Okey Ndibe's Foreign Gods Inc. , and NoViolet Bulawayo's We Need New Names , and Taiye Selasi's Ghana Must G(o ). These novels are selected based on purposive sampling. The conceptual framework for the analysis is anchored on Critical Afropolitanism; a theoretical model that exposes the gap in the Selasean and Mbemberean model of Afropolitanism, as tacitly, a utopic idealism since it ignores the issue of cultural politics and those existentialities which impede the Afropolitan citizenship of the world they project. Critical Afropolitanism calls attention to hostile Afro-diasporic encounters, the precarity of existence, and the host community's strategies to stifle the Afropolitan attempts at cultural negotiation, acculturation, and finding cultural belonging, in the new African Diaspora. Two strategies are uncovered, hostility and delegitimation (Otherness) because of the African migrants' accent, hairstyle, body shape, skin colour, and racial origin. The study concludes that such negative encounters problematize the notion of cross-cultural connection or citizenship of the world associated with the Afropolitan identity.