"Cultural Hybridity and the Role of Mimicry in The Arrangers of Marriage by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’"

Abstract

In the course of analyzing Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s The Arrangers of Marriage, this study provides a postcolonial reading of the short story with reference to Bhabha’s hybridity and the short story is also evaluated using I.A. Richards close reading. reflection of a Nigerian immigrant’s trauma through culture shock, the crises of identification of African women in a patriarchal immigration context and forced marriage of Chinaza in the USA. This paper pays more attention to how Adichie as a writer presents the central character’s struggle to maintain her Nigerian heritage and culture in the era of Americanization culture and other forms of domination. In the narrative of the novel, the author shows the material and emotional cost of migration to save culture and to obliterate it. Also, it portrays actions of patriarchal autocracy that stifles Chinaza freedom under the regimen of gasol and vectors of gender and culture oppression. As such, this paper aims to discuss how Adichie challenges these dynamics through the use of language, plot development and characters. In reference to the conceptual system developed by Bhabha it assesses the process leading to the earthly construction of the ‘third space in which the notion of the single subject is contended as well as recontended. The research establishes how the author develops portrayal of hybridity and resistance in detail negating binary oppositions of cultural and gendered power relation within diaspora. Thus, this research expands the current discourses on postcolonial literature and with it consequences for the concept of immigrant status as well as cultural and gender shifts. By using said aspects of analysing a narrative strategy the study demonstrates that even now, it is important to discuss Adichie’s works with thematic focuses on topics and issues such as migration, identity, and structural injustice.