Reading the Diasporic Abiku in Helen Oyeyemi's The Icarus Girl
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 9250772 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Ouma Ouma (University of Cape Town, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2014 |
| Volume | 45 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 188 |
| Publication date | 2014-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Research in African Literatures (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0034-5210 • E-ISSN: 1527-2044 |
| Publisher | Indiana University Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.2979/reseafrilite.45.3.188 |
| OpenAlex | W2054714318 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
| References cited | 16 |
This essay reads the abiku figure in Helen Oyeyemi’s The Icarus Girl (2005) in its new context of migration. This context, read as diasporic, provides a framework in which the abiku child confronts structures of racialized interpretation. Oyeyemi’s novel invites us to consider the tension between the narrative of abiku as Yoruba myth/legend with a particular material culture and its new diasporic double as a subject of psychoanalytic interpretation—Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). The essay reads this interpretive tension, which is triggered by the protagonist’s split racial identity, as an opportunity for reexamining the signifying practice of the abiku figure within changing spatiotemporal contexts. The diasporic abiku lends itself to varied modes of storytelling, and of narrative practices occasioned by its new transplanted contexts, that allow Oyeyemi’s novel to reframe the discourse on migration and race in relation to a continuously evolving cultural space of the African diaspora
Aesthetics · Art · Context (archaeology) · Diaspora · Identity (music) · Literature · Mythology · Narrative · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · Storytelling · Caribbean history, culture, and politics · Diaspora, migration, transnational identity · Gender Studies · History · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies · Psychology
The black Atlantic
Double Consciousness in the Work of Helen Oyeyemi and Diana Evans
Ora na-azu nwa
Ghostly Girls in the “Eerie Bush”
Half and Half Children”
The Concept of Abiku
Helen Oyeyemi and the Yoruba gothic
Explorations in Animist Materialism
Black Paris
A Critical Divination
An Abiku-Ogbanje Atlas
Cartographies of Diaspora
| Unique citing works | 3 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,33 |
| Citation span | 2017 - 2025 (9) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 3 |