ABSTRACT
Scholars have argued for a vision of the future, which champions positive values and discards those deemed detrimental to sustainability, tolerance and cooperation. This represents a paradigm shift towards Transmodernity, a position which reacts to Modernity and Postmodernity and proposes a constructive – rather than deconstructive – vision of humanity. This chapter considers such a vision in two novels, Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000) and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah (2013), early twenty-first century novels that explore the complexities of identity within different ontological paradigms. The chapter considers transculturalism, related to both postcolonial and multicultural expressions of identity, to address how postmodern theory pervades contemporary literature, and how contemporary authors react to that dynamic. Through White Teeth and Americanah, the chapter elucidates the use of modernist and postmodernist elements in understanding how characters construct their transcultural identities, and considers a transmodern formulation of identity as a by-product of this intersection. The backgrounds of the protagonists, the focus on various class, racial and ethnic contexts, and geographic migrations all point towards a diversity of experience that modernism and postmodernism do not specifically address in their formulations, and the question becomes whether a construction of transmodernism might be able to account for that lack.
