Conclusion

Abstract

The book’s conclusion is also a new chapter: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah provides a means of revisiting and theorizing the innovations of the other writers. Adichie’s novel provides a digital poetics of migrancy: Ifemelu, moving between Nigeria and the United States, expresses her hybridized and unmoored sensibility in the spontaneous prose of her blog, which allows her to utter herself at once, without mediation. Adichie’s novel predicts such cycles of exposure and outrage as characterize today the dopamine-inducing loops of social media. Although it hasn’t previously been realized, Ifemelu’s spontaneous outbursts return us to evangelical Christianity, since she’s shaped by her mother’s search for communal security through a series of Nigerian congregations. The author draws on Cheng Pheah’s notion of the world as not the globe, but a temporally undecided zone of possibility—a Nigerian woman experiences moments of relation that, enabled by the instantaneousness of digital messaging, have serious consequences.