Transatlantic Recrossing and the Shaping of African and African American Identities: An Analysis of Ayi Kwei Armah's Osiris Rising (1995)

ADOU Kouamé

Numéro Libre – Quatrième Trimestre 2012 (2012) Page(s) 1 - 12 ISSN 2076-6130

Ayi Kwei Armah, Ghanaian writer and author of seven novels, worries about African and African American identities and what remains from it after the forced crossing of the Atlantic Ocean and the western colonization. These two historical phenomena are strongly connected to the problem of cultural alienation which strikes not only the African societies but also the whole Black Diaspora. As most of the writers of the former English colonies, his writing is both an exploration of the African historic and cultural universe and an attempt to restore the inheritance which gradually crumbled off and deteriorated in the contact of imperial cultures. This cultural problem is put with acuteness in his sixth novel, Osiris Rising , published in 1995 in Senegal. This novel, which actions take place in the United States and in Africa, is focused on African American and African characters obsessed with the reconstruction of the African past and the redefining of themselves in an environment in which they seem to undergo the torments of a Eurocentric perception of the world.

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ADOU Kouamé. « Transatlantic Recrossing and the Shaping of African and African American Identities: An Analysis of Ayi Kwei Armah's Osiris Rising (1995) ». Revue Ivoirienne de Langues Étrangères, Numéro 5, 2012, p. 1. ISSN 2076-6130.