Displacement and Migration in African Literature: A Post Colonial Study of Serum Afolabi's a Life Elsewhere and Adiche Chimanda's Americanah

The study explores the Displacement and Migration in African Literature: A Post Colonial Study of Serum Afolabi's A Life Elsewhere and Adiche Chimanda's Americanah. In achieving this aim, the following specific objectives were laid out to scrutinize the extent to which the identity status of migrants in Americanah and A Life Elsewhere lead to discrimination in their hostland, explore the denigrating realities of migration and the attendant dislocations demonstrated in the texts understudy and demonstrate that the tenets of postcolonial theory are viable tools for projecting the challenges faced by migrants. Migration is here explored in the light of how its attendant realities; of stereotypes, gender bias, racial discrimination, class difference, among others; amount to social exclusion, isolation and denial of opportunity. This research proceeds on the assumptions that migration is only an illusion of a better lease of life and that, there arein the selected texts, representations of the tendencies of dislocations, identity crises and stereotypes that accompany migration. Consequently, the research adopts postcolonial discourse as a theoretical framework in order to explore the binarisms that the tenets of Postcolonialism provide in terms of gender, race, and class, among others. This work is significant because it will serve as a resource material, relevant for scholars whose interests are in exile literature, African Literature, Migration Studies and other related fields in that, it centres on a contemporary issue which is migration especially with the recent ailing economy that rocks most countries of the world, and the imbalanced power relations that exists between different countries. The research therefore concludes that the world of migrants is a dicey one and it dislocates, alienates and stereotypes on account of the binaries that characterise race, gender, class and other forms of identity markers within the experience of migration.