Recently new novels about the Biafra war have appeared, proving the ongoing impact of the Nigerian civil war on writers’ interest, and the importance of memory in our life. For all these reasons, I decided to write the present thesis on how memory function in a literary work. The objective is to analyse the literary representation of the Biafra war, with a special focus on individual and collective memory production through two fictional novels: Half of a Yellow Sun, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Under the Udala Trees, by Chinelo Okparanta. In analysing the literary representations of Biafra in the light of memory studies, I have identified two levels of memory: literary characters’ memory and writers’ memory. Focusing on the level of the memory of the characters, I explored what the characters remember about the Biafra war both when the war is over and when it is still in progress, and what strategies they use to remember or to forget painful memories of the war.  What emerged through this first level of analysis is how Adichie and Okparanta have offered narratives focused not only on accounts of the war, but also on feelings and emotions. Moreover, the strategies of remembering and of forgetting represent tools of survival, and they are not in a relationship of exclusion. Focusing on the level of writers’ memory, I explored the perspectives used by Adichie and Okparanta to narrate and remember the Biafra war: a perspective from below, focused on ordinary people and on their daily lives; a female perspective which represents a novelty in a literary landscape dominated by male writers; the danger of a single story and its risk to create hegemonic narratives; the fictional perspective as a way to enrich a historical event with suggestive details fruit of writers’ imagination; the Afropolitan perspective and the greater openness of mind of the new generation of African writers.

Migration and its consequences are often discussed in contemporary postcolonial discussions. This topic of migration is central in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah. Adichie’s portrayal of the migrating subject has placed her in the center of the Afropolitan discussion about transnational Africans and their right to represent. This essay aims to bring this discussion to light. Furthermore, with the use of Benedict Anderson’s ideas of nations as imagined communities, Edward Said’s definition of Orientalism, and Homi K. Bhabha’s concept of mimicry, this essay intends to illuminate the colonial discourse of Americanah’s America. I argue that the novel’s protagonist Ifemelu’s migration to the land of the free is bordered by remnants of colonial discourse, placing her within a western array of marginalization. As Ifemelu struggles with issues connected to her migration into a culture that marginalizes and discriminates under the proud flag of “the American Dream,” she is forced to resort to mimicry of western traits, to get access to western privilege. I contend that the mimicry of western traits consequently reduces her presence in America to partial.

No description available.