The Location of Transnational Postcolonialism in Afrodiasporic Novels

Late twentieth- and twenty-first-century Afrodiasporic literature resonates with concerns related to transnational postcolonialism in three fundamental ways: first, interconnected histories; second, mobile home/lands; and third, Afropolitan identities. To elaborate these three aspects, this chapter critically examines Caryl Phillips ’s Crossing the River (1993), Imbolo Mbue ’s How Beautiful We Were (2021), and Chibundu Onuzo ’s Sankofa (2021) and argues that these texts demonstrate the lingering effects of colonialism on a transnational scale. The primary aim of this chapter is to interrogate how these categories – transnational and postcolonialism – reflect the outcome of mass migration and movement across borders in the wake of globalisation in the genre of the Afrodiasporic novel. This reading underlines how the conjunction of transnational postcolonialism facilitates a deeper engagement with new developments in Afrodiasporic literature in the age of global modernity, where the notions of (Afro)diaspora urge a different approach.