The Construction of Blackness in "Americanah" by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Table of contents 1. Introduction ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1 2. The construction of Blackness --------------------------------------------------------------- 2 3. Liberal (pl)attitudes ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 5 4. Afropolitanism ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 8 5. Ifemelu as an Afropolitan character -------------------------------------------------------- 10 6. Conclusions ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 13 7. Works Cited ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 14 0 1. Introduction The tradition of telling stories about Africa has not been doing justice to the complexity of the continent. In 2009, Nigerian-born writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie gave a memorable TED-Talk called “The Danger of a Single Story“, where she reminds her audience that, as early as the XVI century, travelers engaged in a rhetoric meant to legitimize imperialist interests by portraying Africans in a dehumanizing way. They were, in the words of traveler John Lok, “beasts who had no houses“ (Adichie 06:3507:00). Probably the most prominent account of dehumanizing portrayals of Africans is Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novel Heart of Darkness, about which Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe writes that it is making Africa “a place where man’s vaunted intelligence and refinement are finally mocked by triumphant bestiality“ (3). In light of her observation that telling stories about other people means to exercise power, I am reading her 2013 novel Americanah as an attempt to correct the one-sided story about Africa. I show how Ifemelu, the main character of Americanah, is part of a multi-faceted narrative about being African, precisely because she deconstructs the “essential black subject“ (Hall 443), an identity she is subjected to in the United States of America. By the construction of Ifemelu's Blackness I mean that her identity results from white society imposing oppressive constraints on her, most notably on her affect 1. By refusing what I will call the “affective identity“ projected onto her, she complicates Blackness and refuses the victimhood of being the “racialized Other“2, becoming an Afropolitan character. I then offer a short overview of the concept of Afropolitanism, while bearing in mind that “[t]he right question is not so much What or who are the Afropolitans? But what work can Afropolitanism do to illuminate and enhance our understanding of Africans in and of the world today?“ (Skinner 17) 1 2 1 In this paper, I use the term „affect“ synonymous to „emotion“. I use this term in reference to Ava Ladry’s “ethnicized Other“ (Landry 127). 2. The construction of Blackness „The white gaze, the only valid one, is already dissecting me.“ (Fanon 95) Quoting Jamaican-British sociologist and cultural theorist Stuart Hall, my account starts with the premise of the “extraordinary diversity of subjective positions, social experiences and cultural identities which compose the category ‘black‘“, leading to the recognition that “‘black’ is essentially a politically and culturally constructed category.“ (443) I am interested in how exactly Blackness is constructed in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s 2013 novel Americanah and how the main character, Ifemelu, contributes to deconstructing it. Frantz Fanon’s famous words “For not only must the black man be black; he must be black in relation to the white man“ (90) emphasize the construction of the category “black“ through the metaphor of getting “fixed“ by the “white gaze“ (95), insofar as “any ontology is made impossible in a colonized and acculturated society“ (89). Fanon’s words translate, for me, into a denial of an identity which is independent of the perspective of white people. In this chapter, I will show how this denial reverberates into the lives of Americanah’s black characters through the expectation to feel in certain ways, affect being the main playing field where black subjects “must be black in relation to the white man“. For the sake of consistency, I will use Stuart Hall’s term “black subject“ throughout the course of this paper. I will start with Aunty Uju, aunt of the main character Ifemelu, who is complaining about the racism she encounters in her day-to-day-life as a medical worker. One day, she tells her niece about her white Russian colleague Olga, who, as a doctor, plans on moving to an area where the patients would not be black (Adichie 142). Not only is Aunty Uju not at all outraged by Olga’s blatant racism, but she confers her understanding and even grants her the title of being her “friend“. She has, in Fanon’s words, come to accept the “innate complex“ of being black (Fanon 95); she has internalized the “self-as-other“ (Hall 445) . The fact that Aunty Uju does not even think about being outraged proves that she has accepted the identity expected from her. Systemic oppression prevents black subjects from expressing negative emotions, yet at the same time white society constantly believes itself in danger of the black subjects' 2 explosive anger. The imperative of withholding negative emotions becomes a key element of black identity in relation to the “white man“. In Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon describes a scene where a woman is trying to keep her child from mentioning the skin color of the black narrator, warning them that they are making him angry. He goes on telling about the fear of the child who thinks “the black man“ is trembling with rage and that he is going to eat them (Fanon 93). Not only black adults’ anger, but also black children’s anger must, at all costs, be avoided: When the teacher of Aunty Uju’s son complains to her that the child is aggressive, Aunty Uju reflects on it: “just because he looks different, when he does what other little boys do, it becomes aggression.“ (172) Another example is Ifemelu, who, after having success with her blog and being invited to speak about race in front of an audience, becomes aware that “the point of diversity workshops is not to inspire any real change, but to make people feel good about themselves“, so she starts adjusting to her audience, saying “what they wanted to hear“ (305). She does not use the same provocative, controversial tone she has when writing. Emenike, Obinze’s friend, “spoke in a tone cleansed of anger, thick only with a superior kind of amusement“ when telling a story about a racist taxidriver to a white English audience (275). In her blog, Ifemelu writes about the set of affects expected from black people when talking about racism: “Don’t complain. Be forgiving. If possible, make it funny. Most of all, don’t be angry“ (221). Systemic opression expects black subjects to accept the idea of careers that white people ascribe to them. In a blog post, Ifemelu writes about “Professor Hunk“, the name she has given to her African American boyfriend Blaine, who “wanted to get straight As in high school because of a white teacher who told him (...) black people are physically inclined and white people are intellectually inclined“ (375). Therefore, systemic opression denies individual identity, seeing individuals as a collective, as Stuart Hall avows: “it is one of the predicates of racism that you can’t tell the difference because they all look the same“ (444). Not only Blaine, Aunty Uju is also experiencing this phaenomenon when she tells the story of how she “had forgotten to bring out the unreturned book from her handbag, and the guard told her, ‘You people never do anything right.‘“ (182) Ifemelu as well experiences the ascribed collective identity when her teacher asks her to give the “black“ perspective in a class at university (220). Aesthetics is another domain where black people have to relate to the norm of whiteness. Much has been written about the topic of hair in Americanah, and it is 3 significant that the novel starts with Ifemelu, who is undertaking a trip to Trenton to get her hair braided. Hair is one of the main topics of the novel; as Adichie says in a 2014 interview with Synne Rifbjerg, the African hair braiding salon is “a subculture I hadn’t really seen in literature“. (Adichie 07:40-07:48) It is during the six-hour-session of hair braiding that Ifemelu is thinking about her past 13 years in the US. Her presence in the hair salon is structuring the storytelling, as the narrator always comes back to it to inform us about the progress of the hair braiding and the happenings in the salon. According to Cristina Cruz-Gutiérrez, black natural hair is “devalued and considered scruffy, in need of being normalized.“ (66) She continues: “the binary opposite ‚good/bad‘ hair has for centuries been an epistemological tool used to juxtapose western and Black beauty, devaluing the status of the later, and reinforcing an Eurocentric aesthetics.“ (66) A symptomatic scene, which illustrates how black women adopt Eurocentric aesthetics takes place in the career services office, where Ruth, Ifemelu’s African American counsellor, shares with her the secret to success in job interviews: “My only advice? Lose the braids and straighten your hair. Nobody says this kind of stuff, but it matters. We want you to get that job.“ (Adichie 202) Another example which illustrates the primacy of Eurocentric aesthetics is Miss Margaret, who automatically assumes that Ifemelu has been treated badly, and that must be because of her hair: “‘You leaving?‘ Miss Margaret asked, downcast. Sorry, hon. They need to treat folk better around here. You think your hair was part of the problem?“ (212) Because natural black hair is considered “scruffy“ and “kinky“, black women must straighten it in order to fit the subdued identity that has been ascribed to them. Ifemelu’s decision to write a blog also has to do with Eurocentric beauty standards: In a bookstore in the Inner Harbor, Ifemelu shows her white boyfriend Curt that black women are not represented in women’s magazines. Beauty products are described as if for an exclusive white audience, for example a pink lipstick: “‘This says that this pink lipstick is universal, but they mean universal if you are white because I would look like a golliwog if I tried that shade of pink.“ (295) This moment is crucial for Ifemelu, as it is the incitement for her to write a blog about race. Black subjects are compelled to constantly relate to hegemonic white standards not only in the US, but in Africa as well. Whiteness becomes something to aspire to, and so Obinze’s wife Kosi is proud to be “half-caste“, i. e. to have a light skin, enjoying the question “‘Is your mother white?‘“. Obinze is disturbed by “the pleasure she took in 4 being mistaken for mixed-race.“ (22) Bartholomew, Aunty Uju’s boyfriend, is also bleaching his skin (117), which shows that not only black women are affected by white beauty standards, but men, too. To sum up, ubiquitous submissiveness is the way in which black subjects are supposed to be in relation to “the white man“. The best example is Aunty Uju, who radically changes when she comes to the US: she doesn’t want her son to be bilingual because “[t]his is America“; she is dating a man she is not in love with because “[w]e are not in Nigeria“ (118); she relaxes her hair out of fear not to look professional because “[y]ou are in a country that is not your own“, and she puts on an American accent that makes her become „apologetic and self-abasing.“ (108) The imperative to feel compliant subsumes the expectation to adopt certain careers and aesthetics; therefore, the “intricate racialized and racist legacy of America“ (Phiri 122) becomes palpable and evident. In the next chapter, I show how this “intricate racist legacy“ is perpetuated, in Stuart Hall’s words, even though there appears a “program of anti-racism“, engendering a “set of reversals“ (444). The “counter-position of a ‘positive’ black imagery“ (442) identified by Hall is not enough to disrupt this racist legacy. 3. Liberal (pl)attitudes In this chapter, I am introducing the concept of radical empathy, which has been coined by Mark Libin. I see radical empathy as part of the program of anti-racism: While in the past, black subjects have been portrayed in a negative light in the media, it seemed necessary to portray them exclusively in a positive light, “putting in the place of the bad old essential white subject, the new essentially good black subject“ (Hall 444). As I argue below, a society which is struggling to overcome the construction of Blackness is still a racialized society. Mark Libin’s analysis of post-apartheid affect can be transposed onto the relationship between whites and people of color in the US. This chapter, like Mark Libin’s Reading Affect in Post-Apartheid Literature, departs from “the premise that cultural and national identity (...) has undergone a radical transformation to supplant the harsh hierarchical, political, economic and social divisions“ (Libin 2). By comparing post-apartheid South 5 Africa with post-civil rights US, I elaborate upon the premise “that the nation needed to reinvent itself as egalitarian through feeling“: this “resulted in a compelling societal incitement to feel in particular ways: to feel compassion, empathy, guilt, foregiveness (…)“ (2) which can also be described as “the task of creating a climate of radical empathy“ (154). I will focus on the imperative to feel compassion. This preserves the distance to the perpetrator identity and also emphasizes the hierarchical element of privilege (160), recalling the systemic opression of those who receive compassion. Through compassion, “the repressive nature of the system convinces them that even the smallest gestures of respect or kindness are truly heroic“. (153) Following the premise of the climate of radical empathy and the “societal incitement“ to feel compassion, white characters like Curt are driven by a constant urge to expose their “altruistic, benevolent yet essentially colonial gaze“ (Libin 45). The ebullient and enthusiastic Curt is persistently preoccupied with performing good deeds to his black girlfriend. As soon as they start dating, he is urged to officially announce it, to let the world know that he loves her, being driven by a desire to be seen. Not only his cousin needs to be informed about the fact that he is dating a black woman, but Ifemelu herself has to witness his pride in going out with a person of color: „Curt had never been with a black woman; he told her this after their first time.“ (195) He constantly performs the role of the white saviour3: he finds Ifemelu a job and, when they talk about visiting Paris, he complacently tells her: “‘I love that I get to show you Paris!‘“ (196) For every good deed, he expects gratitude and a unique position in her life: “I want to be the fucking love of your life!“ (224) The white saviour complex is part of a performative program of anti-racism and, as part of its many strategies, emphasizes the exceptionality of black people. Frantz Fanon writes how a person considering themselves free of racial bias describes their Senegalese colleague by immediately adding “very smart guy“ / “very intelligent“ or “very gentle“: “there is always something unusual about them [black priests, doctors and statesmen].“ (Fanon 93) Kimberley, Ifemelu’s employer, repeatedly emphasizes the fact that black women are beautiful: “‘I’m meting my beautiful friend from graduate school’, Kimberley would say, or ‚We‘re working with this beautiful woman on an inner-city project’, and always, the women she referred to would turn out to be quite 3 6 The concept of the white saviour has been coined by writer Teju Cole in 2012. See https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/03/the-white-savior-industrial-complex/ 254843/, last accessed on the 27th of March 2021. ordinarily looking but always black.“ (146) Curt’s mother abruptly compliments Ifemelu on her lashes (198), making Ifemelu wonder that “[s]he must have tried really hard to find something to compliment“ (199). Pointing out pleasing physical features of black women almost becomes a duty, and so the first thing Ifemelu hears from an unknown man at a party is that she is beautiful, that “African women are gorgeous, especially Ethiopians“ (169). While beauty is attributed to black women, being educated and out-spoken is obsessively attributed to black men: Laura tells Ifemelu that she “met the most charming Nigerian man today. (…) I read on the Internet that Nigerians are the most educated immigrant group in this country.“ (167) As if recounting incredible facts, Laura reports to Ifemelu that he was “well-groomed and well-spoken“ (168). Scholar Ava Landry has pointed out that “Laura condescendingly describes the [Nigerian] doctor in a positive light, as if she is surprised by his achievements, demeanor, and presentation of self“ (142) She is “presenting their [Nigerian immigrant’s] level of achievement and assumed class identity as proof of their humanity and deservedness.“ (142) Landry goes on to state that Nigerian immigrant’s achievements are “especially heralded because it excuses white people and their predecessors of their accountability in racial systems.“ (143) The compulsion to point out the humanity and deservedness of black subjects and, in this way, to show compassion, is especially striking as part of the “program of anti-racism“ (Hall 444) when we remember that, according to Paul Gilroy, “humanity“ as the target audience of Enlightenment is „rather restrictively defined“ (Gilroy 43) - i. e., black subjects, as well as women4, are exempt from it. Demonstrating aggressive interest is another compassion-inducing reversal of racism. For instance, Curt’s aunt Claire nervously talks about safaris and prominent personalities like Nelson Mandela or Harry Belafonte in Ifemelu’s presence just to reassure her that she likes black people, to the point where “Ifemelu worried that she [the aunt] would lapse into Ebonics or Swahili“ (Adichie 293). Paradoxically, radical empathy sometimes turns a blind eye to race and inequality, abnegating them. As Sara Ahmed points out in The Cultural Politics of Emotion, “what is relegated to the margins is often, (…) right at the centre of thought itself“ (4). Therefore, the omnipresent topic of skin color becomes a taboo, and systemic opression turns into a non-subject: Curt’s mother seems to be convinced that “America is now color-blind“ (Adichie 293), but in the same conversation, she is acquiescing to her son’s 4 Women are the “repressed or irrational other of rationality identified as male“ (Gilroy 45). 7 opinion that the presence of ten black people in her restaurant would have a negative impact on diners, contradicting herself. When in a clothing store, the cashier asks Ifemelu and her friend Ginika whether they received any help. After Ginika says yes, the cashier wants to know which of the salespeople it was, asking whether it was “the one with the long hair“ or “the one with the dark hair“, although both had long, dark hair, making Ifemelu wonder why the cashier did not use the skin color as a distinguishing feature. Ginika’s answer is telling: “Because this is America. You’re supposed to pretend you don’t notice certain things.“ (127) Another example is Blaine’s older sister Shan, who writes a book about racial discrimination and complains that her editor wants the book to be more evasive: “So if you’re going to write about race, you have to make sure it’s so lyrical and subtle that the reader who doesn’t read between the lines won’t even know it’s about race.“ (336) White society’s best intentions manifest either as compassion or elevating the marginalization of black subjects to a taboo. White characters must perform compassion through iteration: They must reassure themselves of their heroic benevolence and claim the black subject’s exceptionality, up to the point of negating any difference between them and the black subjects that might remind them of any systemic injustice. Hence, Blackness is constructed even through the “set of reversals“ that the “program of antiracism“ (Hall 444) dictates. Society remains racialized. In the next chapter, I will briefly introduce the concept of Afropolitanism as a possibility that can overcome the construction of Blackness and Ifemelu’s prescribed affective identity. 4. Afropolitanism In his 2007 article „Afropolitanism“, Cameroonian-born historian and cultural theorist Achille Mbembe draws the portrait of an intellectually stagnating Africa in the wake of decolonization, immersed in nationalism and victimization ideologies, which hinder cultural products from contributing to contemporary thought. While not explicitly critiquing imperial rule in the article, he draws attention to pre-colonial Africa, whose mobility has been frozen by the “modern institution of borders“ (Mbembe 58), given that miscegenation, vernacularization and dispersion had always been part of the continent’s identity. Focusing on Africa’s precolonial modernity and entanglement in 8 the world should help “finish the as yet unfinished project of decolonization“ (Gehrmann 64). This ambitious almost has a missionary tinge, especially bringing to mind Chielozona Eze’s words: “Afropolitanism promises some moral re-examination of the world“ (Eze 244). This concept emerged from Afro-emancipatory thought (Balakrishnan 576) and first became popular with Taiye Selasi’s essay “Bye-Bye Babar!“ from 2005. Afropolitanism can be described, in Susanne Gehrmann’s words, as “cosmopolitanism with African roots“ (Gehrmann 61), as “an attempt to reconceive an African identity – and ergo, of Africa – outside of racial terms“ (Balakrishnan 575). Interestingly, both Selasi and Mbembe use the trope of standing up: “It is high time the African stood up“ (Selasi); Mbembe completes it with the image of a “bruised human that slowly stands up and emancipates him/herself from their origins“ (qtd. in Gehrmann 65). The main feature of this concept is leaving the victim identity behind, focusing on a new African self which, in Mbembe’s account, coincides with the “old“ face of precolonial Africa, hidden by centuries of colonization. Selasi is envisioning a “new demographic“ of Africans when she writes about “beautiful, brown-skinned people“, “smiling, sweating men and women fusing hip-hop dance moves with a funky sort of djembe“, easy to recognize by the “funny blend of London fashion, New York jargon, African ethics, and academic successes“. The essay concludes that these new Africans are “the-coolest-damn-people-on-earth“ (Selasi). Selasi’s stance is “clearly related to a postcolonial gesture of twisting the simplified colonial image of Africa around“ (Gehrmann 63); nevertheless, her account has also been disparaged. The most widely-known critique is that Selasi’s Afropolitanism is only including affluent Africans from the diaspora who can afford traveling, making it an elitist, a-political and commodified concept (Gehrmann 62) that can also become “a slippery slope toward crass consumerism“ (Skinner 5). Achille Mbembe also acknowledges this new demographic described by Selasi, even calling it a “second wave of Afropolitanism“ which “corresponds with Africa’s entry into a new age of dispersion and mobility“, being “characterized by an intensification of migration“ (qtd. in Gehrmann 65). Altough it has also been argued that “Afropolitanism (…) is not so much a good idea as it is (…) ‚good to think with‘“ (Skinner 3), Mbembe’s account of Afropolitanism has been said to be “apt to lead the way towards an integral transformation of identity politics“ (Gehrman 64). 9 When it comes to literature - writing and other arts being where “day-to-day-realities experienced by colonized peoples have been most powerfuly encoded“ (Ashcroft and Griffiths 1) - Ulla Rahbek and Eva Knudsen postulate an emerging Afropolitan literary aesthetics that is characterized by the main trope of a “mobility-induced anxiety“ which is “the result of feeling lost in-between homeland and host-land“ (Knudsen and Rahbek 118), emerging from being acutely transient and a passenger between worlds. 5 This is interesting insofar the “traditional“ African is featured as a so-called “been-to“ character who, after visiting the “West“, returns home “to a familiar place“ that has not changed and therefore does not have any anxiety about their identity (Knudsen and Rahbek 118). In Americanah, Ifemelu, as well as Aunty Uju, just like the mobile diaspora Selasi writes about, is traveling between worlds: Nigeria and the US. This mobility induces an alteration of identity, making Africa as “home“ a disorienting place. As Ulla Rahbeck and Eva Knudsen note, this is illustrated in Ifemelu’s feeling that “[a] ripe tomato could burst out of the ground“ (Adichie 385) when she goes back to Nigeria. What is of interest to me, though, is not so much the literary tropes that qualify the novel as Afropolitan, but how Ifemelu overcomes victimhood in the novel. In the following chapter, I show how Ifemelu complicates Blackness by refusing the (affective) identity that has been projected onto her. This way, she is refusing victimhood, which is also the main reason why Ifemelu is an Afropolitan character. 5. Ifemelu as an Afropolitan character From the beginning of the novel, we encounter Ifemelu as a character that questions, rather than meekly accepts facts. The first chapter starts with Ifemelu waiting to take the train from Princeton to Trenton to braid her hair, and “she wondered why there was no place where she could braid her hair“ (Adichie 3). Thus, she is implicitly critiquing the marginalization of non-Western beauty practices. Felix Mutunga Ndaka argues that Ifemelu’s evolution makes Americanah a Bildungsroman, challenging the bourgeois, masculinist narrative where women characters were included only to ensure the appropriate development of male characters (205). Since Ifemelu is, from the beginning, 5 Mobility, as well as digital mobility via cyberspace, has been considered a key concept of Afropolitanism by Susanne Gehrmann; moreover, cybermobility is, in her opinion, the main reason for the success of the “Afropolitan generation“ (63). 10 a character with a very strong sense of agency, I would not adhere to the view that she undergoes an evolution; instead, I argue that she is, from the beginning, an Afropolitan character. Unlike Aunty Uju, Ifemelu is a character who is not only brave enough to trust that the observations she makes about people around her are accurate, but who, unimpressed by hierarchical relations, always speaks her mind. Even if this sometimes leads to conflict, she does not hesitate to defy Laura, the sister of her employer Kimberley. When she and the two sisters look at a picture of a white, skinny woman surrounded by black babies in a magazine and Laura praises the appearance of the woman, Ifemelu comments that her thinness “is by choice, and theirs [the babies’] is not by choice“ (Adichie 162), causing a puzzled Laura to call Ifemelu “sassy“. By calling her "sassy", the white character loudly points at a long-standing racist steoreotype in the US: the angry black woman (see Patricia Hill Collins). Later, her sister apologizes for Laura’s reaction, but Ifemelu “had begun to feel a flash of impatience, because Kimberley’s repeated apologies were tinged with self-indulgence“ (163). When Kimberley attributes the adjective “beautiful“ to every black woman she encounters, Ifemelu straightforwardly expresses her opinion: “‘You know, you can just say ‘black‘. Not every black person is beautiful.‘“ (147) From the beginning, Ifemelu’s relationship with Curt is tinged with sarcasm, which is illustrated in her reaction when Curt condescendingly confesses that she is his first black woman: She raises an imaginary glass, uttering “Here’s to a milestone, then!“ (195) Far from feeling gratitude for Curt’s behavior, Curt’s ebullience “made her want to strike at it, to crush it“ (197), and when Curt confesses that he wants to be the love of her life, she is startled (224). Ifemelu directly criticizes the imperative to feel gratitude by remembering her boyfriend Obinze, who conflates exaggerated gratitude with immigrant insecurity (119). Ifemelu refuses to feel compliant about unanimously accepted platitudes: when a Haitian poet claims, at a dinner party, that race has never been an issue to her, Ifemelu bluntly tells the woman that this is a lie (291), unmasking her utterance as wishful thinking, not minding the fact that she is intriguing the guests and possibly discomforting them. Moreover, Ifemelu writes a blog called Raceteenth or Various Observations About American Blacks, proving she refuses to stay quiet about discussing race in public. She is not hesitant about correcting the simplified image Laura has of African Americans when she complains that they have “all those issues“, telling her that 11 “[m]aybe when the African American’s father was not allowed to vote because he was black, the Ugandan’s father was running for Parliament or studying at Oxford“ (168). By not feeling grateful (not for Kimberley’s benevolent behaviour towards her, nor for Curt’s acts of benevolence) or compliant, Ifemelu is choosing not to behave according to a prescribed affective identity. Her African American boyfriend Blaine urges her to feel solidarity for Mr. White, a black security guard from the library, who got the police called on him because a white employee falsely accused him of dealing drugs. The fact that she did not want to go to the subsequent protest becomes a turning point in her relationship with Blaine, who starts resenting her for not feeling solidarity with a fellow Black person: “She recognized, in his tone, a subtle accusation, (…); she was not sufficiently furious because she was African, not African American.“ (345) In an honours history seminar, Ifemelu exposes her point of view that using the N-word is not always hurtful, because “it depends on the intent and also on who is using it“ (138), showing she does not adhere to the common expectation to feel offended, which causes strong reactions from her fellow American classmates. By doing this, she refuses the collective identity of “Blackness“ that the US subjects her to (Landry 136), thus “complicating“ and subverting it. Ifemelu not only refuses to feel according to the expectations of white and Black Americans, but she also decides not to fake an American accent anymore when she realizes that she feels misplaced pride after being told she sounds American. After a telemarketer compliments her on her pronunciation, she asks herself: “Why was it a compliment, an accomplishment, to sound American?“ (175) And last but not least, Ifemelu does not comply with the prohibition to exhibit negative emotions; when her flat mate insults her by assuming she would perform voodoo on her dog, Ifemelu is not hesitant about being angry: “Ifemelu felt acid in her veins; she moved toward Elena, hand raised and ready to explode“ (152). 12 6. Conclusions Blackness is constructed, in Americanah, through certain expectations African Americans and African immigrants are subjected to. 6 They are expected to perform feelings of compliance, gratefulness, and even to feel offended when acts of racial prejudice occur; they are also expected to withhold any feelings of anger. Ifemelu is a character that is non-compliant, not easily offended and not grateful, who does not withhold her anger. This way, she thoroughly refuses the affective identity projected onto her, thus refusing to be victimized as the „racialized Other“. This refusal of victimization is, finally, what makes her Afropolitan. 6 Expectations of African immigrants and African Americans overlap to some extent, but are quite different: Ifemelu being complimented on her American accent strikes differently precisely because she is an immigrant and didn't grow up speaking American English. 13 7. 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