NEW ROUTES TO THE AFRICAN DIASPORA(S): LOCATING

NEW ROUTES TO THE AFRICAN DIASPORA(S): LOCATING ‘NAIJA’ IDENTITIES INTRANSNATIONAL CULTURAL PRODUCTIONSByOlaocha Nwadiuto NwabaraA DISSERTATIONSubmitted toMichigan State Universityin partial fulfillment of the requirementsfor the degree ofAfrican American and African Studies–Doctor of Philosophy2017

ABSTRACTNEW ROUTES TO THE AFRICAN DIASPORA(S): LOCATING ‘NAIJA’ IDENTITIES INTRANSNATIONAL CULTURAL PRODUCTIONSByOlaocha Nwadiuto NwabaraNigerian American Yvonne Orji–star of HBO Series Insecure–shared her self-definedexpressions of her Nigerian Diaspora aka ‘Naija’ identity at a Breakfast Club online interview. Shedemonstrated her negotiation of her Nigerian and Black American identity, and in doing so revealsthe multiplicity of her Black identity. The Nigerian Diaspora is increasingly producing normalizedtropes in global Black popular culture, such as formulations of the Nigerian film industry,Nollywood, and transnational music in the Afrobeat and Naija Mix genres. Cultural productionsthat come from these and other Nigerian cultural industries are being created and represented bymembers of the Nigerian “cultural” Diaspora all over the world. These cultural representations aremapped onto cultural artifacts (e.g. film, music, literature, television, food, clothing) are reflectedback into diasporic communities when accepted by its members as having meaning and tellingstories of their everyday experiences. Works like these are constitutive of a growing cohort andbody of cultural productions emerging from the African Diaspora in the post-colonial era. Examplesexamined in the current dissertation study include the now famous Nigerian Diasporarepresentations conveyed in cultural productions such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’sAmericanah, rapper Wale’s “My Sweetie” and “The God Smile,” Yewande Omotoso’s Bom Boy,Akin Omotoso’s Man on Ground, and Adze Ugah’s Jacob’s Cross to name a few.This dissertation is situated within the growing scholarly discourse about new AfricanDiasporas through the prism of cultural diasporas. To guide the study theoretically, I draw fromAfrican Diaspora theorists such as Kim Butler, Isidore Okpewho, Paul Zeleza, Juan Flores, and

Ruth Simms Hamilton as well as from Cultural Studies theorists Stuart Hall and Pierre Bourdieu toexamine select Nigerian artists, their productions, and subsequent representations in the NigerianDiaspora as cultural diasporas. I present these cultural productions of Nigerian diasporas as a wayof examining the transformative and transnational identities (i.e. racial, ethnic, cultural) andcommunity formations that are forged in the dialectical relationship between African homelands(Nigeria) and African Diaspora hostlands (the US and South Africa).In this dissertation, I argue that the social construction of the core identity formation ofNigerian Diasporas (Naija) has a purposeful and useful function for Nigeria in the world through itsmigrants Diaspora hostlands. The study shows the Nigerian Diaspora identity in this regardacknowledges and unifies Nigerians wherever they may be in the world and allows them to assertsan emotional attraction and belonging to the Nigerian homeland. The social construction of ‘Naija’is used in this study as prism for interrogating issues facing Nigerian people in their respectivediasporas, while also revealing the distinctive cultural life-styles that Nigerian Black immigrantsbring and contribute to their hostlands. The research design focuses in on those primarycomponents of the cultural diasporas–the experiences of the cultural producers (interviews andpublic talks) and the analysis of their cultural productions (literature, film, television, YouTube,music)–in order to extrapolate cultural representations of the Nigerian Diaspora communities in theUnited States and South Africa. The study aims to use this data to significantly contributeperspectives of how Nigerian Diasporic cultural identities and experiences are self-represented andexerted in global Diasporic communities, specifically in the racially and ethnic diverse nations ofthe United States and South Africa. Further, the dissertation examines how representations of selfand community becomes decolonial tools for defining and asserting complex Black Diasporicidentities and cultural formations.

Copyright byOLAOCHA NWADIUTO NWABARA2017

This dissertation is dedicated to the people of the African world:those who came before us, those who exist today, and those yet to return.v

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTSEven when we walk our roads alone, it’s always with the guidance of those we met alongthe way. I must begin by thanking my parents, grandparents, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, andcousins–blood and chosen, living and departed–who shared their love and support in variousways. Between my family of kin and closest friends, I survived this journey and will surviveendless more. Sometimes it was encouragement, words of caution, a heartfelt or casualconversation, love via good food, or a place to lay my head. So many thanks must go to mydissertation chair, Dr. Rita Kiki Edozie, for her passionate and no-nonsense guidance as a BlackStudies Africanist mentor, teacher, scholar, and friend. She brought me into Africana Studies,and helped me transform the matters of my heart into heartfelt and intentional research projects. Ialso want to thank my dissertation committee–Dr. Glenn Chambers, Dr. Tama Hamilton-Wray,and Dr. Galen Sibanda–for their honest, encouraging, and patient support through thisdissertation journey.I thank my dear friend and big brother, Tracy Flemming, for being a relentlesslysupportive mentor to me from the very start and for teaching me the path by being an exemplarof it. I thank my dear friend and big sister, Tando Songwevu, for constantly reminding me of theimportance of centering my and my people’s worldviews in how I find and implement solutionsfor African communities. Thank you to all the Nigerian Diaspora artists who allowed me tointerview them (sometimes multiple times due to rookie mistakes), who graciously gave meaccess to their artwork and at times entrusted me with vulnerable unreleased material, and whobrought life to my own personal existence as well as to my research through our conversationsabout the importance of storytelling.vi

Thank you to the colleagues and friends I’ve made in at Michigan State University(MSU) especially in African American and African Studies (AAAS), at Grand Valley StateUniversity especially in African and African American Studies, and in various institutes at theUniversity of South Africa (i.e. the Center for Pan African Languages and CulturalDevelopment, the Thabo Mbeki African Leadership Institute, the Archie Mafeje Institute forApplied Social Policy Research, the Institute for African Renaissance Studies, and the Institutefor Global Dialogue) for the life long relationships we’ve begun. Thank you to the units andorganizations that have provided resources, financial or otherwise, to my project such as MSU’sAAAS, College of Arts and Letters, The Graduate School, the Office of Study Abroad, theAfrican Studies Center, the Alliances for Graduate Education and the Professoriate, and theCenter for Advanced Study of International Development.I also want to give a special thanks to The Bomb Shelter production company forpatiently passing along endless hours and hard drive space of Jacob’s Cross and The BurningMan, and to EMBO Media for providing extensive research support in South Africa over theyears. Lastly, I want to thank the National Council of Black Studies (NCBS), the African StudiesAssociation (ASA), the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora(ASWAD), and the Africa Conference at the University of Texas-Austin for developing Africancentered spaces, with extensive graduate student resources, for emerging Black Studies teacherscholar-activist such as myself to build upon the innovative scholarships of others.vii

PREFACEI am a Black, Igbo, Nigerian, African, American, female, loving, inquisitive, andstubborn storytelling traveler who is constantly changing. Like any African, or human, my pathhas been forged by my environments and by my communities. However, my journey isdetermined by how I respond to the worlds that made me, and by those worlds I have yet toencounter. I turned left on the fork in my road labeled “Africana Studies, Ph.D.” because I wascurious to know myself, as a product of multiple African communities: Black America andNigeria. I grew up knowing that in ways I belonged to and was excluded from both communities.But for the life of me, I could not understand why the exclusions, and at times tensions betweenthe communities, when both spaces looked to me like reflections of each other.Two different and diverse Black worldviews, no doubt, but there was a celestial level ofcomfort I felt existing in these African communities that was always the same. It’s the samefeeling I’ve come to experience from traveling to South Africa over the past few years, makingclose relationships with Africans and exchanging worldviews. It’s the same feeling I have todaywhen I am unable to distinguish a Nigerian song, from a West Indian song, or from a SouthAfrican song because my father lovingly flooded my siblings’ and my ears with African worldmusic from Detroit to Lagos to Trenchtown to Soweto and back again. I feel alive, represented,and connected to a Pan-African reality.I wanted to tell stories about my myself, my family, and my communities from a place oftruth and knowing. What better way then to learn how to conduct research to more accuratelywrite our realities into existence? I came to Black/Africana Studies because a series of futurementors–both living and departed–showed me it was alright to seek African epistemologies andlived experiences as well as to center them as guides to how I produce knowledge. More so, theyviii

revealed that my passion for experience-based knowledge was already at the core of thedisciplinary objectives. Black/Africana Studies–a discipline dedicated centering the African livedexperience to produce academically excellent and socially responsible knowledge towards theliberation of African people–would allow me to develop a multifaceted interdisciplinary researchdesign that could combine the histories, cultural studies, and ethnographies of an Africandiasporic community to represent their environments, experiences, and productions.The story I aim to tell today is about the decedents of ancient people, who happen to beborn into what is now Nigeria. I do while not being unmindful that many generations of thosedecedents are also being born in places like the United States, Brazil, and Cuba as BlackAmericans, Afro-Brazilians, and Afro-Cubans. It’s a story of travel across space and time,focusing on how people in this case study–today’s Nigerian–move between spaces, interact witheach other and other African communities, and bring who they are along with them. I chose torepresent these travelers’ journeys from the perspective of their storytelling and by examiningthe cultures that they create. I hope that my work here can contribute an African-centeredmethodology of engaging and studying the cultural creations of African communities moregenerally in order to–as Manning Marable would suggest–more descriptively, correctively, andprescriptively generate and disseminate self-determined representations of global African people,identities, and knowledge.ix