Mediating women's globalized existence through social media in the work of Adichie and Bulawayo

This article considers the transmission of affect through social media in the recent work of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Americanah) and NoViolet Bulawayo (We Need New Names). The young protagonists, Ifemelu and Darling, both use the Internet and various social media to question the disembodied and deterritorialized spaces that digital networks potentially engender. While they at first fail to see their connections to spaces as mediated, in part because of their youthful ages, they ultimately begin to recognize both the constructed and mediated nature of the relationships at home and in the diaspora. What the young women's examples demonstrate is that the Internet or blogosphere constitute peculiar spaces of access to both homelands left behind and the host cultures. They ultimately reach the conclusion that, despite the visual, aural, and synchronous contact that computer-mediated communication allows, the lack of a physically present body limits the transmission of affect.