A Non-American Black Guide to American Blackness
This chapter’s focus on Black immigrant authors addresses the tension between the continued racialization of American culture and shifting demographics that undermine the applicability of previous definitions of Blackness. Novels such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah make explicit the connection between the prominence of such immigration and the rise of a figure such as Barack Obama. As Adichie’s novel makes clear, Obama’s background—the son of an African student and a white mother—underlines the shifting definitions of racial identity in twenty-first century America. While her protagonist’s presence in the United States is testament to the symbolic resonance that America still holds as a land of opportunity, her ultimate disillusionment with the United States, and the role that race plays in her return to Nigeria, underscores the incompleteness of the project of racial progress. The chapter engages with Afropolitanism as a post era discourse related to the African immigrant experience.