dc.contributor.author | Darroch, Fiona | |
dc.date.accessioned | 2021-08-23T13:52:31Z | |
dc.date.available | 2021-08-23T13:52:31Z | |
dc.date.issued | 2020-11-24 | |
dc.identifier.issn | 2083-2931 | |
dc.identifier.uri | http://hdl.handle.net/11089/38738 | |
dc.description.abstract | Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novel Americanah provides provocative reflections on intertextuality and becoming by exploring the potentially transformative power of “blog-writing.” Through a combined reading of Mayra Rivera’s Poetics of the Flesh and Adichie’s Americanah, this article details intersections between the virtual and the material; writing in the (imagined “other-wordly”) blogosphere about the organic matter of hair. The narrator of the novel, Ifemelu, establishes a blog after she shares her story to decide to stop using relaxants and to allow her hair to be natural, via an online chat-room; she refuses to go through ritual performances in order to succeed as a migrant in America. In this article I argue that Adichie’s detailing of Ifemelu’s relationship with her hair explores the way in which creative practice, or poetics, is intimately connected to the journey of our flesh; social history is marked on our bodies. The blog becomes a confessional which details the demeaning effect that social constructions of race have had on her body. But the blog ultimately becomes self-destructive. It is only when Ifemelu returns to Nigeria that she embodies the transformative and cathartic power of contemporary modes of story-telling, and where she is finally able to “spin herself into being.” | en |
dc.language.iso | en | |
dc.publisher | Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego | pl |
dc.relation.ispartofseries | Text Matters: A Journal of Literature, Theory and Culture;10 | en |
dc.rights.uri | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0 | |
dc.subject | Adichie | en |
dc.subject | theopoetics | en |
dc.subject | materiality | en |
dc.subject | hair | en |
dc.subject | blog-writing | en |
dc.title | Journeys of Becoming: Hair, the Blogosphere and Theopoetics in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah | en |
dc.type | Article | |
dc.page.number | 135-150 | |
dc.contributor.authorAffiliation | University of Stirling | en |
dc.identifier.eissn | 2084-574X | |
dc.references | Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. Americanah. London: Harper Collins, 2013. Print. | en |
dc.references | Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. “The Danger of the Single Story.” Online video clip. Ted.com. TED Ideas Worth Spreading July 2009. Web. 5 Mar. 2020. | en |
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dc.references | Cooper, Brenda. A New Generation of African Writers: Migration, Material Culture and Language. Suffolk: James Curry U of KwaZulu-Natal P, 2008. Print. | en |
dc.references | Cruz-Gutiérrez, Cristina. “Hair Politics in the Blogosphere: Safe Spaces and the Politics of Self-representation in Chimamanda Adichie’s Americanah.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 55. 1 (2019): 66–79. Web. 22 Oct. 2019. https://doi.org/10.1080/17449855.2018.1462243 | en |
dc.references | Danticat, Edwidge. Krik? Krak! New York: Soho,1991. Print. | en |
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dc.references | Keller, Catherine. Intercarnations. Exercises in Theological Possibility. Fordham.universitypressscholarship.com. Fordham Scholarship Online Jan. 2018. Web. 5 Mar. 2020. | en |
dc.references | Pui-Lan, Kwok. Postcolonial Imagination and Feminist Theology. London: SCM, 2005. Print. | en |
dc.references | Rivera, Mayra “Poetics Ashore.” Literature and Theology: A Special Issue on Theopoetics 33.3 (2019): 241–47. Print. https://doi.org/10.1093/litthe/frz025 | en |
dc.references | Rivera, Mayra Poetics of the Flesh. Durham: Duke UP, 2015. Print. | en |
dc.references | Sandwith, Corinne. “Frailties of the Flesh: Observing the Body in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus.” Research in African Literatures 47.1 (2016): 95–108. Web. 4 Sept. 2019. https://doi.org/10.2979/reseafrilite.47.1.95 | en |
dc.contributor.authorEmail | fiona.darroch@stir.ac.uk | |
dc.identifier.doi | 10.18778/2083-2931.10.08 | |