Breakable binaries : representations of twins in African and African American literature, film, television, and cultures

Abstract

This project explores the fascinating trope of twins in our cultural imaginary, examining representations of twinship in twentieth- and twenty-first-century African and African American literature, film, and television. Considering such texts as Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun, Toni Morrison's Paradise, Jesmyn Ward's Where the Line Bleeds, and ABC's series Black-ish and Sister, Sister, along with several other novels and Nollywood and Disney films and series, this dissertation observes the representational parallels among twin figures across several genres and media. This study finds the trope of twins to be a helpful optic for viewing how these texts achieve the subversion of colonial boundaries, particularly related to race, region, and culture. Using a theoretical framing composed primarily of Homi Bhabha's and Gloria Anzaldua's conceptions related to hybridity, ambivalence, and third spaces, along with several other contemporary arguments that challenge aspects of these foundational ideas, this project analyzes the ways in which these twins-centered texts may be considered resistance texts, rejecting colonial imaginaries related to strictly segregated perimeters for the constructs of race, region, and culture, and conveying, instead, an ambivalence that evokes colonial anxiety. Because of this shared spirit of colonial resistance, this project argues that African and African American texts could be viewed as twins themselves, negating an often unseen, unconsciously imposed rift that mentally splits Africa and the West into an unbreakable binary.