Power Shift: America in the New Nigerian Imagination

In the last five years, novelists of Nigerian descent have been making attention gathering waves in Anglophone writing circles with prize winning stories driven by topics that do not quite fit the postcolonial problematic as it has been conceived in the past two decades. The dominant characters in these earnest novels suffer no debilitating psychological angst about the singular and unified nature of their being and destiny within a modern nation state. The stories have garnered coveted accolades like the Caine and Commonwealth fiction prizes, although the straightforwardly realist narratives resemble Chinua Achebe's more than Salman Rushdie's. Their intertextual references are to Achebe's staid Things Fall Apart and not Amos Tutuola's wild The Palmwine Drinkard. Interest in virtuoso displays of textual self-reflexivity in these novels appears mild at best. This paper proposes that the novels complicate the story of the postcolonial subject by recentering the individual and casting in positive light the migrant artists' relationship to their homeland.