Decolonizing Narratives: Identity Reconstruction in Selected Postcolonial Anglophone African Novels

Daniel, Belay

dc.contributor.author	Daniel, Belay
dc.date.accessioned	2026-08-18T07:08:31Z
dc.date.available	2026-08-18T07:08:31Z
dc.date.issued	2026-06
dc.identifier.uri	http://ir.bdu.edu.et/handle/123456789/17001
dc.description.abstract	The colonial experience profoundly disrupted African identities through the imposition of Eurocentric representations that relegated indigenous histories, cultures, and epistemologies. Although political independence has been attained across much of Africa, the bequests of colonialism continue to shape the ways Africans perceive and negotiate their identities. Existing scholarships on postcolonial African literature have extensively examined themes of colonial oppression, hybridity, migration, and resistance. However, limited attention has been paid to how postcolonial African novels employ decolonizing narratives as mechanisms for reconstructing African identities. This study, therefore, aimed to explore how postcolonial African novels reconstruct identity through decolonizing distorted narratives as reflected in selected Anglophone postcolonial African novels. To this end, three novels, namely Americanah (2013), We Need New Names (2013), and Season of Migration to the North (2009), were purposively selected and analyzed from the vantage point of postcolonial, Afrocentric, and deconstruction theories. The study adopted a qualitative research design grounded in interpretative textual analysis and employed thematic analysis to analyze and interpret patterns of meaning across the novels. As the study is entirely text-oriented, the main sources of data were the selected novels, and therefore relevant extracts for analysis were collected through a close reading of the texts. The results of the analysis reveal that the selected novels not only challenge colonial narratives and representations of Africa (ns) but also actively re-center African subjectivity by foregrounding African values, voices, experiences, and perspectives. In doing so, they celebrate pride, communal resilience, and indigenous knowledge systems. The novels are found presenting postcolonial concepts such as hybridity, othering, and mimicry as strategic narrative techniques for disrupting colonial binaries and destabilizing fixed meanings imposed by colonial discourse. The findings also disclose that, in all the three novels, memory, history, and ancestral consciousness play pivotal roles in decolonizing colonial narratives and reconstructing authentic African identity. The findings further unveil that, although each novel addresses narrative decolonization and identity reconstruction in its own way, they all share common themes such as critiquing colonial representation, resisting racism, portraying migration as both a source of disenchantment and an impetus for Afrocentric awareness, exploring Western education as both a source of alienation and enlightenment, questing for home/belonging, and reclaiming cultural continuity. The study, then, draws a conclusion that postcolonial African novels have the power xi to reconstruct fragmented African identity, enabling characters to decolonize dominant colonial/neo-colonial narratives by reclaiming African voices, histories, and epistemologies.	en_US
dc.language.iso	en_US	en_US
dc.subject	English Language and Literature	en_US
dc.title	Decolonizing Narratives: Identity Reconstruction in Selected Postcolonial Anglophone African Novels	en_US
dc.type	Thesis	en_US