Abstract

Contemporary African diaspora fiction increasingly interrogates migration as a complex condition of displacement rather than a triumphant narrative of arrival. This article offers a comparative analysis of Teju Cole’s Open City (2011) and NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names (2013) in order to examine how African immigrant existence in the United States is constructed through the interlocking experiences of wandering, memory, and hybrid identity. Drawing on postcolonial theory and Homi Bhabha’s concept of hybridity and the “Third Space,” the study argues that both novels represent diaspora as a liminal and emotionally charged condition shaped by historical trauma, cultural negotiation, and the persistent instability of belonging. While Open City articulates immigrant subjectivity through intellectual wandering and reflective detachment in post-9/11 New York, We Need New Names foregrounds childhood migration, material survival, and affective rupture. By placing these texts in sustained dialogue, the article demonstrates that African diaspora narratives resist linear models of assimilation and instead reimagine migration as an ongoing process of becoming one marked by ambivalence, fragmentation, and the labour of remembering. The comparison further reveals that diasporic subjectivity is not uniform but is mediated by age, class, gender, and degrees of personal agency, thereby expanding the analytical reach of hybridity beyond its celebratory connotations.