Peripheral Labor

Abstract

Abstract:This essay gives a literary account of contemporary capitalism's reliance on what Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson refer to as differential inclusion through a focus on labor in contemporary Nigerian migrant fiction. In Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's novel Americanah and Lesley Nneka Arimah's short story "Windfalls," characters find themselves occupying the economic peripheries of contemporary capitalism, oscillating between waged and unwaged work, formal and informal employment. As this essay demonstrates, the mechanisms of narrative peripheralization that these characters contend with also function as a means of maintaining an Anglophone, neoliberal, and value-producing vision of the African continent.