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Title
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Decolonized Trauma: Narrative, Memory, and Identity in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Americanah
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Type
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JournalPaper
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Keywords
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Africa, trauma, narrative, memory, identity, migration, Americanah
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Abstract
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Despite the importance of literature as excellent media for bearing witness to trauma, postcolonial and diasporic literary texts are often dismissed for their falsified accounts of traumatic life experiences. Recent studies on African American literature have stressed the need for a decolonized conceptualization of trauma that would not only disrupt the long-existing white Global Northern perspectives but also recognize feelings of empathy and solidarity among members of the community in these literary corpora. Therefore, the present study adopts a hybrid analytical framework to examine the representations of trauma in the Nigerian American writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah. Specifically, it draws upon Gérard Genette’s narrative levels, Ron Eyerman’s collective memory, and Jeffrey Charles Alexander’s collective identity in order to argue that the novel defies conventional forms of narrative by depicting postcolonial and diasporic identities as volatile and dynamic constructs. The study unfolds the various ways in which the story presents diasporic Africans—that is, the female protagonist Ifemelu and her male lover Obinze—as capable of overcoming the adverse effects of traumatic memories by chronicling an authentic record of their experiences. The findings will also demonstrate that both Adichie and her leading female character Ifemelu create an empowering platform for migrants of various ethnicities to speak up about their traumatic experiences, and thereby establish what is called "cross-cultural solidarity" for reconstructing a new community.
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Researchers
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Behzad Pourgharib (First Researcher), Somayeh Esmaili (Third Researcher), Moussa Pourya Asl (Second Researcher)
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