Transnationalism, Home and Identity in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s The Thing Around Your Neck

Abstract

Using tenets of postcolonial theory, this paper interrogates the different perspectives from which the lives of African women migrants to the United States of America are affected by sustained or unsustained connections with their countries of origin in some of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s stories in The Thing Around Your Neck. It foregrounds transnational practices at the economic, social or political levels as instrumental in the way these migrants position themselves in the multiple spaces they inhabit. It aims at showing that the migrant experience complicates and problematises home, family and identity, leading to a revision in our perception of these categories. It is argued that the migrant subject, in some of the stories, needs to renegotiate her identity in often new and innovative ways, giving rise to what O.M. Nonnini and Aihwa Ong refer to as “new subjectivities in the global arena” (Nonnini and Ong 1997:10).