Audience Design in the Global Novel: Pragmatic Strategies of Translatability in Salman Rushdie and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

As discussed in this monograph, how diasporic novelists like Salman Rushdie and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie address multiple layers of audience for purposes of self-positioning as cultural mediators and pragmatic strategists of readership is the focus of this study. Rushdie’s novels, Midnight’s Children (1981) and The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999) and Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun (2006) and Americanah (2013) are analysed using audience design theory as outlined in Bell (1984, 2001) and the micro–meso–macro framework of pragmatic, narrative and circulation levels. The findings reveal the use of code-switching, glossing, discourse markers, metafictional commentary, and paratextual framing, among other discourse strategies, in the simultaneous address to local, diasporic, and global audiences. The analysis also reveals Rushdie’s later fiction as characterised by a shift from high degrees of linguistic hybridity to cosmopolitan idioms. In contrast, Adichie’s turnaround is uncharacteristically Nigerian yet pragmatic and blogishly styled, making it relatively easy to consume. In the context of postcolonial studies, applied linguistics, and world literature pedagogy, this enables new understandings of the global novel as it relates to audience design in a novel strategy for balancing authenticity and readability.