Transcultural with a Twist: Reading Americanah Contrapuntally

Taking into consideration that transculturalism is an emerging genre in recent American literature, this article seeks to better understand contemporary transcultural experience, through an analysis of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s 2013 novel, Americanah. Nevertheless, rather than embracing the transcultural agenda wholeheartedly, the current study proposes a contrapuntal reading of the novel, that, following Edward Said, promotes “a double perspective” and draws attention to the shortcomings of the transcultural approach. These involve the way transcultural processes are described as free and unconstrained and without awareness of the historical conditions that make certain subjectivities possible. Adichie’s novel belongs to the current transcultural mode of literature, and it does so in a critical manner. From a broader perspective, with its emphasis on the decentred and anti-essentialist, transnational, and translingual aspects of literature, transculturalism may be seen as a possible artistic outcome of what follows postmodernism.