| Summary: | To redraw the boundaries of what love, desire, and romance mean in the context of postcolonial and transnational writing, this article will use arguments by Anne Carson, Catherine Belsey, and others who regard love as inherently transformative, as the springboard for my discussion of Nigerian author Chimamanda Adichie’s novel Americanah (2013). The notion that love functions as a productive interruption of norms can be applied to three aspects of the novel: space, body, and text. The construction of a specific transnational space for the two protagonists of Americanah is marked by geographical travel and emotional border crossing. Accordingly, the first part of the paper will analyse how the lovers fashion their respective spaces of home and belonging, both in Africa and the diaspora. The second part of my analysis will focus on the bodily encounters Ifemelu and Obinze experience, and how intimate sexual acts of love may break down previously erected barriers. The third part of this paper will examine the textuality and language of Americanah’s love story and how its romantic trajectory ultimately escapes its conventional boundaries – geographically, digitally, and meta-textually.
In connecting love with spatiality, corporeality, and textuality in Adichie’s novel, I acknowledge the different affects and effects of love and what it does – as material practice, as embodied experience, and as a discursive and textual construct. Writing a love story against oppression and against restrictive orders, Americanah engages in an empowering act of giving voice to the formerly silenced, of providing wiggle spaces for alternative identity constructions.
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