Representation and Identity: A Postcolonial Comparative Study of Caryl Phillips’ Crossing the River and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah

Abstract

This article is concerned with the representation and construction of identity in Caryl Phillips’ Crossing the River (1993) and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah (2013) from a postcolonial perspective. It contends that a sense of identity for African diasporic individuals is still historically determined by the experience of slavery as well as current racial hierarchies. There are the psycho-traumas associated with forced migration, loss and cultural dismemberment that Phillips’ work explores; but there are also twenty-first century migration, trans-national mobility and racial self-consciousness explored by Adichie. Both narratives are analyzed in this research through Edward Said’s Orientalism, Frantz Fanon on racial psychology, Homi Bhabha on hybridity, Paul Gilroy and his Black Atlantic transnationalism and Gayatri Spivack with her perspective on subaltern agency. This comparative reading illustrates how identity is formed over time through colonial memory, cultural adaptation, border crossing, language acquisition, gender expressions and the politics of self-representation.