Browsing by Author "Maritim, Eric Cheruiyot"

Now showing 1 - 1 of 1
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Focalization schemas, transnational formations and social remittance in the works of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2020-03) Maritim, Eric Cheruiyot; Bangeni, Nwabisa; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This work contextualises Chimamanda Adichie’s novels and collected short stories within the area of migrant transnationalism, arguing that this is an inherent feature of the content and form of the texts. Adichie’s narrative are pre-occupied with motif of migration that, in the contemporary context, is characterised by what David Harvey terms time-space compression. This has facilitated spatio-temporal disjunctures as a result of migrants’ simultaneous embeddedness in multiple cross-border localities. This work therefore contributes to the burgeoning research on transnationalism but gives it a literary dimension by narratologically exploring how border-crossing narratives which trace experiences of migrants and non-migrants, implicate transformations in worldviews of individual migrants and how these idiosyncratic transformations have far-reaching collective implications in their points of origin. This is operationalised through analytic mining of how the presented non-migrants’ and migrants’ encounters are focalised in the narratives at the points where they emigrate, where they immigrate as well as the emergent in-between spaces they inhabit as transnational persons. In tandem with seizing upon how these encounters are focalized, the postcolonial notion of liminality is adopted to account for the processes by which the characters in these transnational locations generate various agentic capacities that are trafficked to their countries of origin as social remittance. Towards this end, it reasons that, with the transnational space conceived of as a liminal space rife with possibilities for socio-politically innovating, migrant characters are veritable agents of socio-political transformation in the communities where they originate and to which they are still emotively attached and committed. Despite this optimism in approach to their transformative function, however, the less salutary implications of their transnational locations are considered.