Digital diasporas and storytelling: Reimagining Black women's narratives in Adichie's Americanah and Gyasi's Transcendent Kingdom

The twenty-first century has brought about a transformation in the ways diasporic identities are expressed, with digital platforms becoming essential spaces for identity-making, cultural negotiation and memory transmission. The earlier researches on diasporic storytelling were limited to oral traditions, novels and community narratives but the rise of digital media gave space for storytelling and diasporic narrative in digitally mediated settings. Hence, this paper explores how African women in the diaspora use digital storytelling in the form of vlogs, blogs, online forums and social media in order to reconstruct and claim silenced voices and create new cultural archives that challenge hegemonic narratives as well as redefine belonging thus showcasing how digital narratives create interactive transnational communities. The paper draws on to Black feminist thought of Bell Hooks, memory studies by Marianne Hirsch, decolonial framework of Walter Mignolo and utilizes Stuart Hall’s theorization of cultural identity as ‘becoming’ rather than fixed and Paul Gilroy’s conception of diaspora as transnational hybridity. The paper also investigates into contemporary digital diaspora theory of Jennifer Brinkerhoff showcasing textual interconnections between digital self-representations on platforms like blogs and social media dealing with migration, race, and gender with that tocontemporary African diasporic fiction such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah and Yaa Gyasi’s Transcendent Kingdom. These digital platforms such as blogs movements and hashtags archive identity, trauma and resistance resonate very well with the narratives of Black women.