Rooting routes to trans-Atlantic African identities: the metaphor of female descendancy in Yaa Gyasi's Homegoing. Issue 1 (2nd January 2021)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Motahane, Nonki; Nyambi, Oliver; Makombe, Rodwell
• Is Part Of: African identities. Volume 19:Issue 1(2021)
• Page Start: 17
• Page End: 30
• Publication Date: 2021-01-02
• Subjects: Identity -- Africa -- African American -- Homegoing -- colonialism -- slavery; National characteristics, African -- Periodicals; Africans -- Periodicals; African diaspora -- Periodicals; Africa -- Civilization -- Periodicals; 305.896
• DOI: 10.1080/14725843.2020.1788505
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1472-5843

Abstract

ABSTRACT: The making and continuous shifts of African identities outside Africa have attracted interest from across critical disciplines. Imaginative literature has achieved a considerable status as a site and optic for critical engagement with evolving dynamics of the diasporization of African identities. This article sets out to extend what is known about this 'function' of literature by looking at how representations of female experiences of forced trans-oceanic African mobilities can potentially disrupt male-centred narratives and epistemologies, to become a critical site to read shifting trans-Atlantic African identities. Using Yaa Gyasi's novel Homegoing (2016 ), the paper explores how the metaphor of female descendancy dominating the narrative emplotment of female experiences of being and becoming African and African American in America, can be read as potentially illuminating and problematizing notions of African diasporic identities and in the process, charting new frames for re-imagining the present and future of African identities in the context of their pasts.