Transnational African Identities in Contemporary Urban Fiction

Transnational African Identities in Contemporary Urban Fiction: Community, Hospitality and Friendship offers a sophisticated and original lens for understanding transnational African identities and their experiences of community, hospitality, and friendship in contemporary urban fiction. Focusing on J.M. Coetzee’s Youth, Zoë Wicomb’s The One That Got Away, Teju Cole’s Open City, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah, it follows South African and Nigerian protagonists navigating cities such as London, Glasgow, New York, Brussels, Philadelphia, Princeton, and other American urban spaces. Through this geographic mobility, the book presents new perspectives on how literature reflects global flows of identity, community, and belonging.

Drawing on continental philosophy, community theory, deconstruction, urban studies, critical, materialist, and aesthetic theory, affect theory, memory studies, gender studies, migration and diaspora theory, and race and Black studies, this book illuminates how systemic power shapes emotions, identities, and communities, which in turn structure urban spaces. It reveals how the literary texts portray both the constraints imposed by social, political, racial, and economic structures and the ideological forces that sustain historical power relations. At the same time, it considers the subtle, nuanced ways in which characters exercise agency, whether resisting or failing to resist the exclusionary constraints of their urban environments. This agency is expressed through walking, embodied practices, and ethical engagement with others, manifesting in acts of community, hospitality, and friendship that challenge the power dynamics inherent in these interactions.