The African as Stranger in Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration To the North(1966) and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah(2013)
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Date
2024
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Université Mouloud Mammeri Tizi Ouzou
Abstract
This dissertation explores the theme of the African as Stranger in Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North (1966) and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah (2013). It begins by examining how the sense of strangeness is reflected in the lives of the protagonists, particularly through their struggles with identity, belonging, and feelings of estrangement. To frame the analysis, the study relies on Julia Kristeva’s Strangers to Ourselves (1991), which introduces the key ideas of the stranger, the stranger within, and the uncanny. These concepts provide the tools to explore how both authors represent the experience of the stranger and the unsettling emotions that accompany it. The dissertation then shows how the protagonists feel out of place both abroad and at home, and how uncanny emotions resurface when they return to their homelands. This highlights the lasting presence of the “stranger within,” suggesting that estrangement is not only linked to migration but also part of the human condition. Finally, this research argues that the African as stranger, as portrayed in Season of Migration to the North and Americanah, is a figure caught between two worlds, always moving along the edges of identity, belonging, and alienation.
Description
61p. ; (+CD-Rom)
Keywords
African Stranger, stranger, uncanny, identity, belonging, alienation
Citation
Literature and Interdisciplinary Approaches