Transcultural Feminist Agency and the Limits of Portability: Re-reading Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Americanah Through the Lagos Return Narrative

Abstract

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Americanah (2013) has attracted sustained scholarly interest for its treatment of race, diaspora, and Black women's experience in the United States. Existing research focuses almost entirely on the novel's American sections, leaving the Lagos return narrative largely underanalyzed. This paper argues that the return to Lagos is not a narrative resolution but a theoretical site where feminist agency, built within one cultural context, encounters the limits of its portability. Drawing on Rosi Braidotti's nomadic subject, Oyeronke Oyewumi's African feminist epistemology, Obioma Nnaemeka's nego-feminism, and Chandra Mohanty's critique of Western feminist universalism, the paper reads the Lagos chapters as a sustained examination of how feminist consciousness must be rebuilt when the cultural conditions that shaped it no longer apply. The paper identifies a productive third path between feminist regression and Western feminist imperialism, situated in Nnaemeka's model of negotiated feminist practice.