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<p>Abstract</p><p>During the last decade many female writers of British decent have focused on identity construction and coming of age. These writers have been especially interested in exploring how people living in the diaspora are trying to cope with their ambivalent feelings towards their mixed cultural heritage. Helen Oyeyemi's <em>The Icarus Girl</em> is one of these novels. The novel depicts a young girl's struggle with the dualism within her, being both British and Nigerian, that threatens to dissolve her self-identity. This essay will explore how <em>The Icarus Girl</em> deals with the theme “double consciousness” (imposed binaries) and how the narrative's structure and stylistic devices enable the story to be read (interpreted) from two different perspectives, thus the narrative's structure offers an ambiguous double reading that corresponds to Jessamy's unresolved doubleness. The first reading suggests that the traumatic experience of “double consciousness“ is left in a status quo, or even being fatal, which in the essay is called the Western reading. The second reading suggests a recovery, i.e. that the young protagonist comes to terms with her mixed cultural heritage, the so-called West-African reading. In pursuing this aim I discuss how “double consciousness” in this novel is a traumatic state of mind transferred from mother to daughter, but also how stylistic devices, belonging to the genre of the fantastic, are used to emphasize the theme and make possible the two different readings.</p>

Abstract During the last decade many female writers of British decent have focused on identity construction and coming of age. These writers have been especially interested in exploring how people living in the diaspora are trying to cope with their ambivalent feelings towards their mixed cultural heritage. Helen Oyeyemi's The Icarus Girl is one of these novels. The novel depicts a young girl's struggle with the dualism within her, being both British and Nigerian, that threatens to dissolve her self-identity. This essay will explore how The Icarus Girl deals with the theme “double consciousness” (imposed binaries) and how the narrative's structure and stylistic devices enable the story to be read (interpreted) from two different perspectives, thus the narrative's structure offers an ambiguous double reading that corresponds to Jessamy's unresolved doubleness. The first reading suggests that the traumatic experience of “double consciousness“ is left in a status quo, or even being fatal, which in the essay is called the Western reading. The second reading suggests a recovery, i.e. that the young protagonist comes to terms with her mixed cultural heritage, the so-called West-African reading. In pursuing this aim I discuss how “double consciousness” in this novel is a traumatic state of mind transferred from mother to daughter, but also how stylistic devices, belonging to the genre of the fantastic, are used to emphasize the theme and make possible the two different readings.

At the end of Toni Morrison’s novel Song of Solomon (1977), Milkman travels to the fictional town of Shalimar, convinced that he is about to reclaim his family's lost inheritance. When he arrives, however, he is sorely disappointed. Instead of the “bags of gold” he was promised, he finds only “Nothing. Nothing at all.” Milkman’s recovery-that-is-not-one encapsulates the simple yet fraught question at the center of this dissertation: How to plot the inheritance not of positive but negative property? Deploying a palimpsestic reading practice, I bring together novels and films, from the twentieth century to the present, that each cohere around this central dilemma: Can the hegemonic form of the British realist novel—the inheritance plot—be rewritten to depict, instead, forms of intergenerational dispossession? In 1973 Raymond Williams surveyed novelistic production in Britain in the nineteenth century concluding that almost ninety percent constitute an “inheritance plot.” This is, according to Williams, any plot in which narrative closure is secured with the intergenerational transfer of property, thereby sedimenting the underlying assumption of a definite relation between economic entitlement and biological property. If, however, nineteenth-century realism naturalized the transmission of wealth, right, and title, “The Inheritance Plot” examines how it has since been refused and mis-used to represent, instead, the inheritance of loss, exile, dispossession, debt, statelessness, and racial trauma. The question, then, that drives my project hinges on a set of productive contradictions: Can the very form that underwrote economic exclusion and juridical alienation be repurposed to trace what Denise Ferriera da Silva calls the oxymoron of “negative accumulation”? Over four chapters, I bring together the fiction of George Schuyler, Willa Cather, Alan Hollinghurst, Helen Oyeyemi, Jordan Peele, Ephraim Asili, Raquel Salas Rivera, and Giannina Braschi, among others, to offer a literary history of the disinherited. Subsequently, I show how each text imaginatively repurposes and rewrites an “inheritance plot” in the attempt to make sense of the intergenerational violence of chattel slavery, empire, and colonialism, while simultaneously exposing the violent fictions that underwrite genealogical regimes of ownership. In tandem, through drawing on Black and Indigenous feminisms, alongside social reproduction and queer theory, I argue that the negativation of the “inheritance plot” has ethical and political significance. In my reading, the inheritance of nothing is—paradoxically—a narrative non-event with a dual function. For instance, Milkman’s inheritance-that-is-not-one serves is both a diagnosis of historical trauma, and it is the sign of a radical reimagination of the world that doesn’t yet lie in succession.