The Deep Stirring of the Unhomely: African Diaspora on Biyi Bandele’s The Street

Informed by the pervasive dispersal of peoples, capital, commodities and ideas across the globe the concepts of home and diaspora have produced some of the liveliest debates in recent times. Previously conceived in essentialist terms as considerably stable models, these concepts have today become intensely contested. This paper examines the manner in which Biyi Bandele engages with these contested notions in The Street. It examines the dialectics of home in diaspora and observes that “unhomeliness,” the postcolonial condition of displacement, invasion, and estrangement of “home,” typifies the experience of displaced subjects as they engage with the project of identification against the drifting (dis)locations of home in two spaces: the natal homeland and the host nation. The street functions not only as the site where subject positions are perennially formed and performed, negotiated and (re)constituted, but also as a metaphor for the dynamic and medial nature of diasporic identity.