Narrating the New African Diaspora. 21st Century Nigerian Literature in Context Palgrave Macmillan. (source)
In this book, I deal with Nigerian diaspora literature, which belongs to the most fascinating and exciting fiction today, and discuss novels and short stories that share a double focus on representations of Nigeria and experiences of the diaspora.
After contextualising the literature, I start with a discussion of how Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun (2006) narrates the Biafran War. I then turn to the depictions of 1980s Lagos in Chris Abani’s GraceLand (2004) and Sefi Atta’s Swallow (2010), and analyse how Helon Habila renders 1990s Nigeria as a prison in Waiting for an Angel (2002).
In the following chapters I look at stories that deal with the leaving of Nigeria by Ike Oguine, Sefi Atta, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the issue of Afropolitanism in the context of Taiye Selasi’s Ghana Must Go (2013), and the negative experience of hybridity of a second-generation child in England as shown in Helen Oyeyemi’s The Icarus Girl (2005).
Finally, I consider writing that offers views on returning to Nigeria in Teju Cole’s Every Day Is for the Thief (2007) and Sefi Atta’s Everything Good Will Come (2005), to demonstrate in the last chapter that Adichie’s Americanah (2013) epitomizes the issue of return migration.
2021 “Remembering Berlin: David Bowie’s “‘Heroes'” (1977)”. Popular Music and Society 45.2. DOI: 10.1080/03007766.2021.1980322 (article)
2018 “Representing the Neocolonial Destruction of the Niger Delta: Helon Habila’s Oil on Water (2011)”. Journal of Postcolonial Writing 54.4, 515-527. DOI: 10.1080/17449855.2018.1451358 (article)
In this article, I discuss the ways in which Helon Habila’s Oil on Water (2011) explores the social and environmental consequences of the oil production in the Niger Delta and claim that the novel amounts to an act of literary activism providing testimony of the destruction of the Niger Delta.
2018 “‘Survival is insufficient’: The Postapocalyptic Imagination of Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven“. Anglica. An International Journal of English Studies 27.1, 165-179. (article)
In this article, I demonstrate that Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven (2014) is a convincing and successful example of postapocalyptic fiction. Set in the aftermath of a pandemic that has wiped out most of humanity, the novel does not focus on survival, struggle, and conflict but rather examines the possibility and necessity of cultural expression in a postapocalyptic setting. In this way, it presents an unusually optimistic and hopeful vision of an otherwise bleak future.
2015 “Bringing Bloom to the Screen. Challenges and Possibilities of Adapting James Joyce’s Ulysses“. Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 40 (1-2), 197-217. (PDF)
In this article I consider the difficulties of adapting James Joyce’s fiction for the big screen. Analysing two feature films Ulysses (1967, Joseph Strick) and Bloom (2003, Sean Walsh) – the two cinematic adaptations of Ulysses (1922) – I argue that it is the novel’s range and complexity, its interiorization, and its experimentation with literary styles that make it difficult to turn the novel into a film.
2020 “Negotiating the Global Literary Market: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Short Fiction”. In Tanure Ojaide and Joyce Ashuntantang, eds. The Routledge Handbook of Minority Discourses in African Literature. London/New York: Routledge. (source)
In this chapter I argue that “African Literature” is decisively shaped by the demands of the global literary market, including the criteria of ‘marginality’, ‘cultural difference’, ‘mobility and migration’, ‘authenticity’, ‘anthropology’ and ‘political engagement and resistance’. In analyses of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s short stories I show that her fiction both adheres to and undermines these criteria.
2019 “Mystery and Memory: Emily St. John Mandel’s The Lola Quartet (2012)”. In Maria Löschnigg and Martin Löschnigg, eds. The Anglo-Canadian Novel in the Twenty-First Century. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter. 173-180. (source)
In this chapter, I introduce the fiction of Emily St. John Mandel. Focusing on her third novel, The Lola Quartet (2012), I show that her fiction often borrows elements from genre fiction (thrillers, crime fiction, postapocalyptic fiction) and revolves around questions of memory and highlights the relevance of culture.
2018 “Epistolarity in 21st Century Nigerian Short Fiction”. In Maria Löschnigg and Rebekka Schuh, eds. The Epistolary Renaissance: A Critical Approach to Contemporary Letter Narratives in Anglophone Fiction. Berlin: De Gruyter. 91-106 DOI: 10.1515/9783110584813-005. (source)
This chapter explores epistolary Nigerian fiction and shows that two major functions letters have in this literature are the narrativization of experiences of diaspora and the practice of advance fee fraud.
2017 “From Mod to Punk: Establishing and Challenging Notions of Britishness”. In Victor Kennedy and Michelle Gadpaille, eds. Words and Music: Ethnic and Cultural Identity in Songs and Song Lyrics. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. 10-30. (source | PDF)
This chapter presents an analysis of “Waterloo Sunset” (1967) by The Kinks and “London Calling” (1979) by The Clash to illustrate the close connections between pop music and British national identity.
2016 “‘Teach Them Our History’: Nigerian Identity Formation in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun“. In Andreas Exenberger and Ulrich Pallua, eds. Africa Research in Austria. Approaches and Perspectives. Innsbruck: Innsbruck University Press. 65-88. (PDF)