In an interdisciplinary analysis of Black women’s diasporic geographies entitled Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle, Katherine McKittrick argues, “Black matters are spatial matters…Black women’s histories, lives, and spaces must be understood as enmeshing with traditional geographic arrangements in order to identify a different way of knowing.” Utilizing McKittrick’s unique cartographic framework, this research project presents an in-depth literary analysis of the 2013 National Book Award-winning novel Americanah by Nigeria native Chimimanda Ngozi Adichie. Interpreting space as political, social, and inescapably meaningful, the presentation argues that Adichie challenges popular American mythos of frontiers as empty spaces and sees them instead as the scaffolding we use tomake meaning from our lived experience. This work connects Adichie to the literary work of African women writers more generally and engages with themes relevant both during the time in which Adichie wrote the novel and in the current age of Trump in which the political world is dominated by themes of immigration, home, displacement, and race.
