Date
8-20-2026
Department
College of Arts and Sciences
Degree
Master of Arts in English (MA)
Chair
Stephen Bell
Keywords
Imaginary homelands, African return narratives, belonging, cultural identity
Disciplines
English Language and Literature
Recommended Citation
King, Renee, "The Dream Itself Was Home”: Imaginary Homelands as a Model for Analyzing Contemporary African Return Narratives" (2026). Masters Theses. 1531.
https://digitalcommons.liberty.edu/masters/1531
Abstract
Although contemporary African return narratives featuring female protagonists explore a wide range of themes, they consistently portray women who struggle to situate themselves within an increasingly globalized world. In these narratives, the homeland initially functions as a stabilizing anchor that emboldens the protagonist to pursue education or employment abroad, yet works such as Doreen Baingana’s Tropical Fish and Chimamanda Adichie’s Americanah reveal that the homeland the protagonists once treated as immutable ultimately exposes itself as a dream. This destabilization unsettles the notion of an unshakeable cultural identity and demonstrates how migration reshapes both the self and the meaning of home. Salman Rushdie’s concept of imaginary homelands provides a productive framework for examining the shifting conceptions of cultural identity in African return narratives. Although applying Rushdie’s framework to every political and psychological dimension of migration exceeds the scope of this thesis, the idea of imaginary homelands nonetheless opens productive discussions about how African protagonists construct idealized versions of home and how the collapse of those imaginary homelands enables dynamic protagonists to reenter an even more dynamic Africa.
