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This chapter examines recent celebrated fictions from the new African diaspora that remake American conceptions of race by placing them in relation to the history of the postcolonial state and its own itineraries of hope and despair, migration and return. Writers like Chris Abani, NoViolet Bulawayo, Chimamanda Adichie, Teju Cole, and Dinaw Mengestu appropriate various genres—the great American novel, the reverse imperial romance, the black Atlantic travel narrative, the ethnic bildungsroman—to delineate new conceptions of diaspora, beyond the assimilation mandated by the conventional immigrant plot or the melancholy sounded by critics nostalgic for simpler moments of opposition between Africa and the West. Often termed Afropolitan, these writers resist received notions of what constitutes African literature, even as they open up numerous critical possibilities for the study of diaspora, expanding previous geographies and weaving together race and class with location.

This chapter examines African war novels published since 2000 against the backdrop of the literary history developed in the rest of the study. The chapter focuses extensively on novels that eschew the easy formulas of child soldier narratives that dominated African fiction in the late 1990s and returned metropolitan audiences to a cliché of Africa as heart of darkness. By contrast, Nuruddin Farah’s Links offers a complex meditation on the ethics of humanitarian intervention and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of Yellow Sun reinvents the domestic novel, extending the project of a people’s history central to the literature of the Nigerian Civil War. Furthermore, both authors engage with the influence of journalistic depictions of war, and thus Farah offers an important response to Mark Bowden’s bestselling Black Hawk Down.

This chapter argues that the sizeable body of fiction which constitutes the novels of the Nigerian Civil War articulates a vital argument about democracy. The fiction maps various divides of privilege, religion and ethnicity, but returns persistently to reflect on the divides of class privilege. The widespread suffering during war revitalizes an awareness of bonds across class and educational divides, and creates solidarity against those who either profit from war or manage to escape the brunt of its consequences. The chapter focuses on works by Chinua Achebe, Buchi Emecheta, Cyprian Ekwensi and Ken Saro-Wiwa among others and pays particular attention to their depiction of bare life as theorized by Giorgio Agamben. The broad survey offered in this chapter is used as the foundation for a reading of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie novel of the war in Chapter 4.

This chapter cites the perils of perfection feminism. Writing on Glass is an online media platform aiming to make the feminist theory more accessible, then, later on, helping other women build businesses. The platform tried to void corporate feminism wherein products and services to women were not benefiting women's rights. However, in late 2018, the business imploded alongside Feminist Incubator as the owner became reliant on male clients and his fiance's income after serving numerous people for little money. According to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the pursuit of perfection is immature as it is the extreme idea of purity within feminism. The passion for feminism is largely in line with resilience than perfection.

A chance meeting with a bail bond agent turned French restaurateur in Falfurrias, Texas, turns the author onto the drug economy in South Texas. After an overview of Mexico’s Drug War, which claimed at least 60,000 lives during the presidency of Felipe Calderon, the author investigates the case of a local drug runner who got caught rolling bags of cocaine into the breakfast tacos he sold out of his taqueria in South Texas. She also expands on Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s concept of “the danger of a single story.”