Hetero-Trans-Nationalism and the Queer Diasporic Child: Figuring Dike as Horizon of Possibility in Adichie's Americanah

This reading complicates Americanah's categorization as a "third" generation story by shifting the focus from its protagonist, Ifemelu, and her return to Nigeria to her young cousin Dike, who comes of age in the United States. I use the term hetero-trans-nationalism to highlight the ways Ifemelu's generationally specific transnational narrative extends a notion of reproductive futurity characteristic of postcolonial nationalism. I queer Dike in order to show how lack and materiality as engendered by his relationship to the novel's overarching hetero-trans-nationalism determine his subject formation. The relationship between Dike's non-belonging and his overdetermined black male adolescent body makes him impossible to imagine within the novel's diegetic world read as such. However, I argue that read closely, the novel exhibits a dependency on Dike—and, thus, queer childhood—that orients our attention beyond the hetero-trans-national limits characteristic of Ifemelu's generational experience and demands a reinvestment in the potentiality of his queer existence. In this reading, Dike shifts from impossible subject to what the scholar Nadia Ellis calls a (necessary) horizon of possibility beyond the narrative. This reading of Americanah alludes to the possibilities of queer diaspora as an alternative framework for considering the lived experiences and inherent possibilities of queer African subjectivities in the twenty-first century.