Re-mapping the Atlantic: transatlantic mobility in contemporary African literature in French and English

This thesis examines a representative sample of five texts taken from that emergent and growing body of writing: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah (2013), Blick Bassy’s Le Moabi Cinéma (2016), Taiye Selasi’s Ghana Must Go (2013), Abdourahman A. Waberi’s Passage des larmes (2009), and Léonora Miano’s Crépuscule du tourment duology (2016/17).

It argues that, in addition to documenting the racism that continues to blight the African and diasporic experience of the space that Paul Gilroy famously called ‘The Black Atlantic’ (1993), these texts also articulate novel African identities that complicate longstanding popular and scholarly models of both blackness and Africanness, models that have existed in Europe and America for decades, even centuries. Specifically, the thesis claims that this body of writing challenges enduring associations of black and African culture in general, and literature in particular, with narratives of victimhood, displacement, and ethnocentrism.