The Location of Transnational Postcolonialism in Afrodiasporic Novels

Join us for a Centre for Pan African Studies seminar exploring how contemporary Afrodiasporic fiction reimagines identity, history, and belonging through a transnational lens.

This lecture brings the concept of transnationalism into dialogue with postcolonialism to explore African and Afrodiasporic literature from a global perspective. I argue that late twentieth- and twenty-first-century Afrodiasporic fiction engages with transnational postcolonialism in three interrelated ways: through the entanglement of interconnected histories, the reimagining of mobile home/lands, and the articulation of Afropolitan identities. To illustrate these dynamics, the lecture examines Caryl Phillips’s historical novel Crossing the River (1993), Imbolo Mbue’s environmental and political fiction How Beautiful We Were (2021), and Chibundu Onuzo’s family saga Sankofa (2021). Read together, these texts highlight the persistent afterlives of colonialism across transnational spaces, each in highly distinctive ways. More broadly, the lecture interrogates how the categories of the transnational and the postcolonial illuminate the consequences of migration and border-crossing in the era of globalization. In doing so, I suggest that the framework of transnational postcolonialism enables a deeper engagement with contemporary Afrodiasporic literature and its evolving negotiations of identity, belonging, and global modernity. 

Speaker

Nadia Butt is Professor of Global Anglophone Literatures and Cultures at the University of Frankfurt. She is the author of Transcultural Memory and Globalised Modernity in Contemporary Indo-English Novels (2015). She has taught postcolonial literatures at the Universities of Giessen, Muenster, Milwaukee-Wisconsin. In 2019, she was awarded the Dr. Herbert-Stolzenberg Prize by the University of Giessen, where she worked as a senior lecturer from 2009 to 2023, for her outstanding achievements in teaching. Her main areas of research are transcultural theory and literature, mobility and migration studies, memory studies, Global Anglophone literatures and travel literatures. Her research has appeared in peer-reviewed, international journals like Prose Studies, Journal of Aesthetics and Culture, Postcolonial Interventions, Studies in Travel Writing, and Journal of Postcolonial Writing. Recently, she has published a handbook on The Anglophone Novel in the 21st Century: Cultural Contexts – Literary Developments (2023) and a special issue in Matatu: Journal for African Culture and Society on the topic “Africa in Europe, Europe in Africa: Transcultural Histories in Anglophone African Literature and Media” (2025). Currently, she is finalising her second monograph The Travelling Imagination in Cross-Cultural Literature.