Ideating Alternative Futures in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah (2013) and NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names (2013): Between Utopia, Dystopia, and Heterotopia
This article explores the ideation of alternative futures through the interwoven lenses of utopia, dystopia, and heterotopia in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah (2013) and NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names (2013). Both novels examine the tensions between imagined ideals and lived realities, situating their protagonists in transnational and postcolonial landscapes marked by displacement, inequality, becoming, and belonging. Adichie’s Americanah (2013) engages with the diasporic condition through the protagonist’s movement between Nigeria and America, offering a nuanced critique of race and identity. Bulawayo’s We Need New Names (2013), by contrast, presents a child’s eye view of postcolonial Zimbabwe and the immigrant experience in the United States, oscillating between dystopian precarity and the fleeting hope of reinvention. Rather than resolving these tensions, both novels embrace complexity, constructing heterotopic spaces that resist binary thinking and allow for the coexistence of contradictory realities. By situating their characters within overlapping geographies of loss and aspiration, both Adichie and Bulawayo challenge dominant narratives of progress and modernity. Drawing from postcolonial theory such as Frantz Fanon’s colonial alienation and Homi Bhabha’s’concept of the third space, this article argues that Americanah (2013) and We Need New Names (2013) interrogate structural injustices while gesturing towards new imaginaries neither wholly utopian nor dystopian, but grounded in the heterotopic potential of transformative critique.
Keywords: Africa, postcolonial, imagination, utopia, dystopia, heterotopia, migration, diaspora.
