Abjuring the Postcolonial Identity: Gender and Masculinity in Chris Abani’s Graceland

This article surveys the concepts of gender and masculinity in Graceland. Set in postcolonial state, Chris Abani’s fictional work addresses the question of gender and the predicament of masculinity in relation to the role of the nation-state, the local culture, and the influence of Western epistemologies. While portraying colonialism’s continuing legacy, Graceland moves beyond the past to confront a present characterised by an increasingly globalised world which underrates the role of the nation and blurs border lines. As a postcolonial nation-state, Nigeria’s colonial history and its aftermath are crucial to the identity formation and “subjecthood” which the fictional communicates. This paper aims to highlight the approaches set forth in Graceland regarding identity, gender norms and race. The analysis of the postcolonial subject focuses on the novel’s standpoints on gender binary concepts surrounding postcolonial literature.