Black Is Black Is Black?: African Immigrant Acculturation in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah and Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing

Abstract

Acculturation studies have long tried to explain the post-migration lives of immigrants. However, much of the literature is psychologically based with a focus on individual well-being and adheres to a universalist perspective. Since the late twentieth century, African immigration to the United States has risen significantly, which has since complicated the experience of Blackness in the United States. When African immigrants enter into the United States, they carry their pre-migration ethnic identities, but they step into a racial context that automatically consumes and labels them as black, a status which they may not have encountered in their home countries. I argue that the process of acculturation for African immigrants consists of a unique, tense, and ever-present struggle between pre-migration ethnic identity and post-migration racial identity, in which African immigrants work both in concert and in opposition to existing notions of Blackness. In navigating the new racial terrain of the United States, African immigrants do the social and cultural work of expanding on what Blackness means in the American context. I propose a model of African immigrant acculturation, which expands on Oberg’s cultural shock and Berry’s acculturation models, that more closely targets the intricacies of African immigrant life. I use the works of Americanah (2014) by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Homegoing (2016) by Yaa Gyasi as case studies to illustrate how African immigrants negotiate their identities in a new racialized milieu and develop new ways in which Blackness can be lived and defined.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 19 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.