From colonial disruption to diasporic entanglements

With a general interest in the production of Igbo identities, this book explores a set of questions which relate to the production, evolution and potential of ‘Igboness’ in literary fiction. What constitutes the meaning of Igbo identity, how is this meaning shaped and sustained, and how has Igbo identity navigated through different historical and contemporary settings? Not any less importantly, what political valences do different notions of Igbo identity hold? In order to address these and related questions, the present book, first, adopts the notion of ‘Igbo identity’ as a highly transformative and heterogeneous category that exists in the plural. Secondly, it defines narratives as significant elements in (re)shaping and illuminating the meaning of Igbo identities. This book thus discusses Igbo identity as a construct created in narrative discourse. It also contends that to consider the question of what Igbo identity means is almost inevitably to consider what it means to write Igbo identity. While narrative construction of Igbo identities can be investigated in a wide range of texts, the author focuses on Nigerian Anglophone novelistic writing and the role of select novels by Chinua Achebe, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Chris Abani vis-à-vis Igbo identity politics.