BREAKABLE BINARIES: REPRESENTATIONS OF TWINS IN AFRICAN AND AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE, FILM, TELEVISION, AND CULTURES PDF Free Download
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BREAKABLE BINARIES: REPRESENTATIONS OF TWINS IN AFRICAN AND
AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE, FILM, TELEVISION, AND CULTURES
________________________________________
A Dissertation
presented to
the Faculty of the Graduate School
at the University of Missouri-Columbia
___________________________________________________________
In Partial Fulfillment
of the Requirements for the Degree
Doctor of Philosophy
___________________________________________________________
by
ALLISON WILTSHIRE
Dr. Christopher Okonkwo, Dissertation Co-Supervisor
Dr. Sheri-Marie Harrison, Dissertation Co-Supervisor
MAY 2024
ii
The undersigned, appointed by the dean of the Graduate School, have examined the
dissertation entitled
BREAKABLE BINARIES: REPRESENTATIONS OF TWINS IN AFRICAN AND
AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE, FILM, TELEVISION, AND CULTURES
presented by Allison Wiltshire,
a candidate for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
and hereby certify that, in their opinion, it is worthy of acceptance.
________________________________________
Professor Christopher Okonkwo
________________________________________
Professor Sheri-Marie Harrison
________________________________________
Professor Karen Piper
________________________________________
Professor Daive Dunkley
iii
DEDICATION
To Emily, the other half of my binary: In all my life, no matter how many words I write,
there will never be words to describe what you mean to me. I am who I am because of
who you are.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This dissertation is, like me, a work in progress. I am grateful to more people than
I can possibly name for their acceptance, support, and encouragement of me in my
progression as a scholar and person as I have written my way through this work.
To Chris: I will never forget our very first conversation. Shortly after receiving
my acceptance into Mizzou’s English PhD program, you called me. Your call was not
solely to encourage me to attend MU but to express your investment in my academic
journey no matter which program I chose to attend. From this initial conversation, which
sparked my instant trust in you, to your commitment to seeing me through to the finish
line even after your move to Tallahassee, you have been a fiercely loyal and trustworthy
advisor and friend. In your steadfast dedication to your students, in your constant support
of their ambitions, you have shown me the kind of professor, and person, I want to be.
To Sheri: I have often called you Superwoman. I suspect that no matter how
successful I become in my career, I will always be somewhat intimidated by you, the
effortlessness with which you exude confidence and wisdom and the ease with which you
hold all the obligations of your work in seemingly perfect balance. Thank you for
accepting me as your advisee and for the work you have always done to find enthusiasm
and interest in my work.
To Karen and Daive: Thank you both for remaining dedicated to my success as a
student over these last several years. I can’t thank you both enough for your investment in
my work and your consistent support of me as a scholar.
iii
To my friends, namely Ariel Fried, Samantha Edmonds, Hayli Cox, Tofunmi
Omowumi, Ashley Anderson, Suzie Vander Vorste, Nigelle Cochran, Zahraa Habeeb,
McKenzie Peck, Caylin Capra-Thomas, Emily Smith, Blake Estep, Logan Johnson,
Hayley Hampton, Tamara Mahadin, Craig Gentry, Valerie Davis, and Mackenzie Bryan,
among countless others: Thank you for continually nurturing my soul with your art and
your friendship.
To my family, my parents Peggy and Buddy Wiltshire, my sister Emily, my
brother-in-law Marcus, my niece Sophie, and my brother Wesley: In all of my crazy
aspirations, you have given me nothing but support. Thank you for embracing my dreams
as your own, just as you always have.
To my twin sister especially: Thank you for being the initial inspiration for this
project, and for all my success.
Thank you all deeply.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS………………………………………………………..…. .ii-iii
ABSTRACT…………………………………………………………………………... .v
Introduction………………………………………………………………………………1
Chapter One: ‘Twinocide’ and Twin Celebration: How Twins Illuminate Racial, Cultural,
and Regional Hybridity in African Literature ………………………………………… . 32
Chapter Two: Powerful Pairs: Tales of Crossed Racial, Regional, and Cultural Lines in
African American Twin Literature…………………………………………………..… . 76
Chapter Three: Nollywood and Disney Duos: Merged Racial, Regional, and Cultural
Borders in African and African American Film and Television Featuring Twins….… . 130
Conclusion……………………………………………………..……………………….183
Works Cited……………………………………………………………………………..188
VITA…………………………………………………………………………………… 204
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BREAKABLE BINARIES: REPRESENTATIONS OF TWINS IN AFRICAN AND
AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE, FILM, TELEVISION, AND CULTURES
Allison Wiltshire
Dr. Christopher Okonkwo, Dissertation Co-Supervisor
Dr. Sheri-Marie Harrison, Dissertation Co-Supervisor
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 Anzaldúa’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.
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INTRODUCTION
Twins are everywhere. In nearly all forms of media, all genres, all major
entertainment franchises, twins are there, typically taking up space in the background.
When twins are allowed their occasional spots in the limelight, they are usually depicted
with harmful stereotypes—as the incessantly odd, peculiarly close pair with tip-to-toe
identicalness, for instance, or as the parodically opposite pair with contrasting
appearances, styles, personalities, and life choices. Despite a plethora of current calls to
move away from caricatured images of various markers of identity throughout
entertainment, few seem to have considered how these stereotypical depictions of twins
may negatively impact lived experiences of twinship for real-life twins. One recent
Reddit page, headlined by the question “Do you ever get annoyed by portrayals of
twins?” comments on these challenges. The poser of the highlighted question writes the
following:
It just irritates the shit out of me when twins are portrayed as two halves of the
same person. I’m reading a book right now that has a horrendous representation of
twins, like they even date the same woman. And it’s just so gross! And the same
thing happened in the show Outlander. Twins are individual people, not a fetish
and not the same person. Don’t even get me started on how the “cool guy” in
shows always makes at least one joke about sleeping with twins. I’m so over it.
(Foghornlegday)
This question sparks a series of threaded comments from twins who, likewise, are
annoyed or have even been hurt by the twin stereotypes perpetuated throughout
entertainment. One comment reads, “The sleeping with twins joke was constant with the
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boys back in high school. That gross fetish never seems to die out” (mermaidsgrave86).
Another says, “It’s disgusting, my sister and I used to get jokes like that even at 12 years
old!” (VegemiteGirrrl). The original poster replies, saying, in part, “I haven’t had it too
bad but I did have a group of frat guys come to my sister and my dorm and ask us to kiss”
(FoghornLegday). The common sore subject that these Reddit users pinpoint within these
grievances is the impact that this adoption of twinship parodies has had on their lives,
particularly as children and young adults forming their identities. Of course, it is common
for all people, and especially children, to adopt fashion trends, one-liners, and behaviors
from books, shows, and films that give them a manual for how the world operates.
Different from “normal,” singleton people, however, entertainment in the forms of
literature, films, and television not only gives twins in their early years of life ideas about
how to perform everyday life as individuals; it informs them, and others, of who they
are—and who they are allowed to be—as a twinned entity. In most entertainment, it
appears that there are two acceptable forms that twinship can take—inflexible opposites
or uncanny identicals, to be brought to the surface of the narrative only in moments that
necessitate an air of eerie freakishness or, at least, peculiarity. According to the Reddit
users, there is no space, it seems, for real-life, in-between twins—identical twins who
may feel rather unidentical, who sometimes have different likes but often shared interests,
who have different personal styles but often dress similarly, and who have altogether
different personalities but often behave quite similarly. There are virtually no depictions
of twin characters who are people first and twins second, and, through this
misrepresentation, twins learn that, irrespective of their views of themselves, the
worldwide perception of them is primarily one of cheapening fascination; they are
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perceived as incapable of achieving “normal,” independent personhood, on the screen, or
in their real lives.
This is one of the central points of interest in which this dissertation takes root,
not only as an inquiry into why twins are such a fascinating spectacle but how the use of
stereotypes for twins can greatly impact twins’ subjectivity and identity development.
This project takes a special interest in these potentially harmful stereotypes for twins as
they appear in African diaspora texts, observing that twins in African and African
American texts in particular seem to be accomplishing something greater than merely
inviting wonder or amazement. As I set out to demonstrate in this dissertation, twinship in
African and African American texts specifically plays an essential role in contributing to
the ideological subversions that I believe are always inherently at play in African
diaspora texts. If Africa, and therefore blackness, is perceived as, as Chinua Achebe
describes, “the antithesis of Europe and therefore civilization, a place where man's
vaunted intelligence and refinement are finally mocked by triumphant beastiality,”
1
the
mere existence of African diaspora art is an automatic rebellion against that erroneous
belief. African diaspora texts also continually challenge conceptions essential to white
superiority—namely, notions of strict borders defining and segregating such
constructions as race, region, culture, gender, and sexuality, among other structures. The
driving question for this project revolves around why twinship tends to be such a richly
employed tool for black authors and creators in rejecting these traditional binary
constructions.
1
Achebe, Chinua. “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.” Massachusetts Review,
vol. 18, 1977, p. 251.
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Here, it is not my suggestion that African and African American texts are bound to
depictions of twins in their destabilization of conventional binaries but, rather, that twins
are a helpful microcosm for observing how that destabilization works. I believe the key to
understanding the art of subversion in African diaspora texts is exploring the paradoxes
often present within that subversion, as African diaspora texts consistently, paradoxically,
rely on stereotypical, often harmful, depictions in conveying themes and messages that
ultimately shatter stereotypical ways of thinking. Interrogating the ways twins within
African
2
and African American literature, films, and television illuminate the subversion
specifically of cultural, regional, and racial binaries, among others, ordinarily thought to
be rigid and fixed becomes extremely interesting given twins’ own paradoxical presence
as a binary in and of themselves. Twins not only exist within a twinned-
nontwinned/twins-singeltons binary; they are also often depicted as a pair of opposites
that contrast each other in nearly every aspect. Ironically, however, even when twins are
portrayed as completely similar—identical in nearly every way—they are often placed
together, their similitude on full display, in order to reveal their differences in a kind of
“spot the difference” game. Alternatively stated, although identical twins are represented
as an indistinguishable pair, this presentation of side-by-side alike beings, in actuality,
invites contrast, not comparison. This ironic contrast in place of comparison is so
2
Perhaps unavoidably, my references to African texts and my readings of those texts as connected to
African American texts may appear to some to be a colonial gesture, an imperialist position that equates
America and Africa in scale and paints with a broad, sweeping brush an image of Africa as a single national
and cultural entity. However, the alternative—focusing on texts out of any one twin-obsessed African
region—would undoubtedly overlook so many notable others. My hope is that my use of the term
“African” as a descriptor for half of the works I have chosen to explore in this project is never read as an
implication of my lack of respect for the cultural, political, and social variances that form the diverse
amalgamation that is the continent of Africa. My sometimes-inexplicit descriptions of texts as “African,”
then, are yet another example of the ways this dissertation aims to cast light on breakable borders, bridging
national—and continental—boundaries originally imposed by colonization.
5
common in cases of twinship that we even use the terms “compare” and “contrast”
interchangeably; we place twins next to each other, comparing them in order to tell them
apart. I believe this paradoxical nature of twinship to be especially significant in
understanding black authors’ and artists’ gravitation towards twins as tools for conveying
unconventional binary breakages, such as hybridized identities related to race, region, and
culture. Through their constant presentation of twinship in ways that are stereotypical,
and, perhaps, even hurtful to twins themselves, the authors and creators of African
diaspora texts achieve what I consider to be a kind of reverse empowerment—the
paradoxical method of leaning into potentially harmful stereotypes for the sake of
achieving an emboldening epistemological traversability to their work.
This artful employment of the stereotypical in order to break stereotypes through
the rejection of clichéd binaries that place such constructions as race, region, and culture
into clear-cut categories is evident throughout even the most classic of African and
African American texts. For example, Ayi Kwei Armah’s illustrations of the corrosion of
the city of Accra in The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born and Amos Tutuola’s reliance on
nontraditional grammar and a hybrid form of English in The Palm-Wine Drinkard both
depict Africa as a place of faulty infrastructure and education, a place of simplicity and
immeasurable misfortune. Similarly, Amiri Baraka conforms to the stereotype of the
“angry black man” in Dutchman, and Ann Petry’s portrait of Lutie in The Street employs
stereotypical depictions of inevitable African American impoverishment. In each of these
classic texts, the authors’ adherences to commonplace, incomplete narratives allow them
to ultimately convey thematic messages that push back against those stereotypes,
revealing the brutality of racism perpetuated by such single narratives and the strength
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and endurance of their characters in spite of those cliché-ridden portrayals. As twins are
nearly always presented in stereotypical ways, when they are present in African diaspora
texts, they are undoubtedly contributors to this paradoxical employment of stereotypes. In
virtually all art forms, I have found that representations of twinship can be separated into
the following stereotypical categories: a.) African spirits or those whose twinship is
clearly linked to African mythologies; b.) The uncanny or twinship as freakish,
supernatural, or subnatural; or c.) Strikingly dissimilar twinship in which twins often
appear as photographic negatives of each other. As I will further explain in the conclusion
of this project, there is a fourth category that I identify within this classification system:
d.) Metaphorical or figurative twinship—that is, twinship that is not biological but is
either conceptualized as spiritual or fictive twinship or is a representation of duality that
holds the potential for a discernable, plausible reading of twinship based on analysis of
the way the characters behave according to “twinny” conventions. While this fourth
stereotypical category certainly offers a forward-looking vision of the potential for the
investigations in this dissertation to inspire new understandings and re-definitions of
twinship as a construction that transcends biology, the first three categories are most
helpful in classifying the representations of twins in the works I will analyze in this
project, which focuses on texts that portray twinship as an almost exclusively biological
construction.
Scientific, psychological, and sociological studies of biological twins continually
demonstrate this typecasting of twins in both fiction and real life, even within these
supposedly objective academic works. As an intellectual field, twins studies is filled with
those who write of twins, predictably, as scientific or psychological subjects to be used
7
for the purposes of defining ‘normal’ human characteristics and behaviors through
negation. For instance, in Twins and What They Tell Us about Who We Are (1997),
journalist Lawrence Wright interrogates the world’s twins obsession, saying “Twins pose
questions we might not think to ask if we lived in a world without them. They are both an
unsettling presence, because they undermine our sense of individual uniqueness, and a
score-settling presence, because their mere existence allows us to test certain ideas about
how we are the way we are” (6). Wright’s ultimate conclusion is that twins fascinate from
afar through their encouragement of an unsettling inquiry into the shaping of identities.
Additionally, in Twins Talk: What Twins Tell Us about Person, Self, and Society (2014),
ethnographer Donna Lee Davis echoes Wright’s inquiry into the draw of twins and the
way they enlighten our understandings of our own identities and our world. While Wright
and Davis, among many others, explore the world’s fascination with twins and even
recognize the harmful fetishization inherent in much of this fascination, throughout their
work, they perpetuate the image of twins as spectacularized, othered figures of strange
duality. Indeed, the titles of Wright’s and Davis’s books alone point to this
spectacularization whereby twins are posited as peculiarities who definitively contrast the
rest of “normal” humanity.
Much of the scholarship on twinship also explores the world’s twinship obsession
through a psychoanalytic lens. Two such authors are literary critic Robert Rogers, in A
Psychoanalytic Study of the Double in Literature (1970), and historian Hillel Schwartz, in
The Culture of the Copy (1996) In these studies, the authors rely on Friedrich Schelling’s
conception of the uncanny as “that which ‘ought to have remained secret and hidden but
has come to light’” (Schwartz 69). Schwartz writes that the obsessive imagining of twins
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as carbon copies rather than largely dissimilar individuals protects from intrusive
questions about singletons’ own identities, and, ultimately, Schwartz draws a connection
between society’s imagined unmitigated identicalness of twins and important societal
contemplations: “The driving historical question is this: How has it come to be that the
most perplexing moral dilemmas of this era are dilemmas posed by our skill at the
creation of likenesses of ourselves, our world, our times?” (10). This question of the
societal propensity for creating and perpetually reinforcing the illusion of sameness is
present again in fiction writer and editor Penelope Farmer’s Two, or the Book of Twins:
An Autobiographical Anthology (1996). And in Dark Twins: Imposture and Identity in
Mark Twain’s America (1989), American literature critic Susan Gillman also draws
attention to twins’ unsettling, paradoxical anti-dividing presence. In Look Twice, Twins in
Contemporary Literature and Culture (2005), cultural studies and language scholar
Julianna de Nooy likewise explores this uncomfortable reconceptualization of imagined
divisions that twins enforce. For de Nooy, “[Twins] are just as available to reinforce
traditional dichotomies as to undo them; they can serve to expose masquerade as the
exception or the norm, to argue for the overriding unity of the self or its fractured nature,
to support a dialectical resolution of conflict or insist on the indefinite deferral of any
synthesis” (164).
In these studies, twinship is viewed as an abnormal state of being that (whether
consciously or unconsciously) is used to define “normal” people (i.e., singletons) to
themselves. Each of these works is an exemplification of the reason twins are virtually
never depicted without carrying some kind of significance beyond just their relationship
as look-alike siblings; they are almost always, perhaps inevitably, seen as counter to
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everyone else. This consistent use of twins as a tool for defining and measuring
“normality” through contrast is also abundantly clear throughout African mythologies,
which contain a remarkably large number of references to twinship. West Africa, in
particular, has the most prominent number of natural occurrences of twins of anywhere in
the world. One study of births of multiples in Nigerian hospitals has found that twins are
present in 40.2 out of every 1,000 births, far greater than the global average, and this does
not even account for the large number of births that occur outside of medical facilities.
3
Given this extremely large natural rate of twins, it makes sense that West African
mythologies seem to be especially preoccupied with representations of twins. Among the
many cultures that West Africa comprises, Yoruba culture is a particularly rich site for
observing the spiritual, biological, socioeconomic, and cultural factors that may have
influenced twins’ representations throughout West African mythologies. In “Magical
Powers of Twins in the Socio-Religious Beliefs of the Yoruba” Taiwo Oruene directly
connects a high number of twin births to the fascination with twinship among the Yoruba,
and in “The Cult of Ibeji, as Reflected in the Oriki Ibeji,” Ourene writes, “Whenever the
phenomenon of the birth of twins confronted the Yoruba, it was regarded from the initial
stage as a birth omen, a portent of evil because it ran contrary to their experience of one
birth resulting from one pregnancy” (230-231). Oruene also explains that in their
assumption that twins were the outcome of two separate fathers, twins were shunned as
symbols of infidelity. Twins were also shunned, according to Ourene, because of the
association between births of multiples and animals. In spite of these associations that
made twins social rejects, however, Ourene explains that eventually, as rates of infant
3
Akinboro, A., et al. "Frequency of Twinning in Southwest Nigeria." Indian Journal of Human Genetics,
vol. 14, no. 2, 2008, pp. 41-47.
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mortality increased, twins became a celebrated symbol of fertility: “[P]eople would
possibly have decided that it is in their best interest not to rid the community of the twins
but rather to make special sacrifice to appease the twins, and at least one of them might
survive infancy” (231). Ourene also describes the nature of the ibeji in Yoruba culture,
explaining that Yoruba oral traditions posit twins as “manifestations of a ‘break through’
of the world of spirits into human society’” (231). The spiritual breakthrough that Ourene
describes is referenced throughout this project, as we see many reiterations of this
spiritual breakthrough in contemporary narratives with twin figures, exhibiting both
conscious and unconscious, subtle and overt, references to Yoruba culture. As I further
reference throughout this dissertation, Renne’s and Bastian’s study “Reviewing Twinship
in Africa” also draws attention to the socioeconomic and religious factors that have
impacted representations of twins throughout Africa, focusing much of their study on
Central Africa. Renne and Bastian particularly discuss the Kedjom people of the
Cameroon Grassfields. In their anthropological study, they explain that the recent cultural
revival of twinship fixations may be explained by “the continued belief in Kedjom
children’s power mystically to transform themselves or disappear (fentah), as well as the
recent economic decline in Cameroon that has made it difficult to educate and care for
children” (5). Renne and Bastian also describe the beliefs surrounding twinship among
the modern-day Dogondoutchi, including twins’ “ability to harm their siblings
(particularly other twins), to hold witch-like meetings in the wild, and to fly invisibly
through the air to meet with their fellow interstitial beings” (6). Additionally, in this
project, I describe Igbo beliefs surrounding twinship, occasionally referencing ethnologist
Udobata R. Onunwa’s study “Igbo Traditional Attitudes to Children: A Religious
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Interpretation of Socio-Economic Need,” in which Onunwa examines child twins’ roles
as “religious functunaries.” Onunwa describes the religious praise after twins are born
among the Dogon of Mali, writing, “The birth of twins among them is a notable event. It
recalls the fabulous past when all being came into existence in twos, symbols of the
balance between the human and the divine, between selling and buying” (625). Onunwa
also notes the reverence afforded to twins as “children of God” in the Bamenda Grassland
to the North of Bangwa of the Cameroons (624). And anthropologist Philip M. Peek,
whose work within twinship discourse is some of the most foundational, important
scholarship for my own work, observes instances of twins within African divination
systems, examining such figures as the Luba and portrayals of male-female oracles and
personal shrines for spiritual doubles, oma and ivri, as well as mythological, artful
representations of twins, out of Bayelsa State Nigeria. According to Peek, even amidst the
variance of cultural representations of twins, twinship “reflects an idea of human
complementarity and balance” (“Couples or Doubles,” 16).
Through these narratives of twins as social and religious spectacles who are set
apart from the rest of society as either subordinate creatures or celebrated figures, it
becomes evident that the stereotypical treatment of twins as symbols of abnormality,
worthy of intense surveillance for the purpose of observing the ways they juxtapose
“regular,” singleton people, is perpetuated in Africa’s mythological twin narratives that
existed long before the birth of that scholarship. My goal in presenting these overlaps in
the representations of twinship throughout African mythologies and current scholarship,
as well as contemporary literature, television, and film, is not necessarily to locate
African mythologies as the exact root of today’s global twinship stereotypes but, rather,
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to posit the mere suggestion of the possibility that today’s single narratives that impact
twins on a global level may have come directly from, or, at least, may have been highly
influenced by historical, mythological twin representations out of Africa. More explicitly
stated, I hope to demonstrate the ways that this narrative overlapping presents the
possibility that colonial interactions with narratives surrounding twinship in Africa have
influenced not just perceptions of twins in the West, as well as throughout the globe, but
also perceptions of singletons through the process of defining “normal,” non-twinned
people by contrast to the “abnormal” stereotypes perpetuated by those twin narratives.
While nearly every mythological and divination system in the world contains at least
some reference to twinship, it is undeniable that the extremely high number of twin
occurrences on the continent, specifically in West Africa and, in some cases, Central
Africa, contributes to the appearance of Africa’s extraordinary fixations on twinship as
compared to anywhere else in the world. However, also irrefutable are the ways Africa’s
twins obsessions are echoed throughout the African diaspora, perhaps most observably in
America. Undoubtedly, the work that aligns most with my project is Karen Dillon’s The
Spectacle of Twins in American Literature and Popular Culture (2018), to which I allude
throughout this project. Dillon writes of American cultural fascinations with twinship
throughout American history and popular culture. Dillon notes such examples as The
Shining, Game of Thrones, and several films produced by Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen’s
entertainment company Dualstar in her study of American popular culture’s
preoccupation with twinship. For Dillon, “The cultural fantasy of twins in the United
States imagines them as physically and behaviorally identical and eerily close in their
twinship” (2). Dillon’s primary argument throughout the book is that popular
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representations of twins in America demonstrate how twinship is a performative
construction: “[T]he performance of similitude, psychic twinship, and the good/bad twin
narrative, for example, shapes the cultural fantasy of twins in literature and pop culture”
(3). Dillon’s observations of the American fascination with twins throughout a variety of
media offer a foundational dialogue to which this dissertation contributes a more
specifically Afrocentric vantage point. Like Dillon, I believe a comprehensive,
multimedia study of twinship representations that examines, in part, African American
texts and considers twinship to be a performative social construction is needed.
Analyzing the ways African and African American creators have represented twinship in
similar ways reveals the similarities in their performances of thematic rejections of
colonial and white-centered narratives that perpetuate notions of strict cultural, regional,
and racial binaries. Because of twins’ perpetual performances within strict binaries, such
as the twinned/non-twinned binary or oppositional binaries performed within their own
twinship, twins, as a literary and cinematic trope, are inherently reflective of strict
dualistic, black-and-white categorical thinking. And, as such, twin figures run counter to
the notions of hybridity that African and African American creators consistently promote,
specifically through artful presentations of racial, regional, and cultural mixing.
Therefore, examining African and African American literature, cinema, and television
about twins, with the acknowledgment of twinship as a performative construction rooted
in stereotypes, as opposed to a strictly biological construction that innately affirms those
stereotypes, offers an intriguing window through which to view the process of black
literary, cinematic, and televised employment of the harmfully stereotypical for their own
14
empowerment
4
. This empowerment, I contend, is a form of colonial resistance bound up
in presentations of hybridity. In their perpetual presentations of hybrid identities, such as
those who straddle geographic, racial, and cultural borderlands, these texts reject colonial
notions of categorical firmness that have been historically used to divide and conquer.
Furthermore, I believe that what the comparatist approach of this project reveals, beyond
other binary subversions, is the subversion of the stereotypical “twinship” in which
African and African American texts are often placed; while they clearly parallel one
another in many ways, they are most often paired in order to be presented as
paradoxically related but wholly dissimilar forms of each other. In this way, I believe this
dissertation has the power not only to transform conventional conceptions of twinship as
stereotypically representative of duality and either sameness or direct opposition, but also
to transform conceptions of African and African American cultures as similar but mostly
culturally disparate.
There are several examples that demonstrate a critical tendency to read African
and African American texts and cultures as, in some ways, at odds with one another, even
(or, perhaps, especially) in studies that attempt an opposite reading. In Chapter Two of
this dissertation, I discuss a number of works within literary criticism that demonstrate
this seemingly unconscious propensity to contrast African and African American texts.
Particularly, I employ the case of literary and ethnic studies scholar Gay Wilentz’s
popular essay “What is Africa to Me?: Reading the African Cultural Base of (African)
American Literary History,” an essay that reads African and African American literature
4
Here I wish to note that my insistence upon the shared subversive empowerment of the texts I analyze in
this dissertation does not equal an insistence upon that empowerment as their sole or ultimate purpose.
Rather, I am merely pointing to the colonial resistance that is a natural legacy of African diaspora texts.
15
and cultures as interconnected. Despite Wilentz’s explicit argument regarding this
interrelation between African and African American literature and cultures, the literary
analyses Wilentz uses to demonstrate this interrelation, I argue, actually demonstrate an
inadvertent trend of reading Africa and African America as completely disparate. John
Cullen Gruesser’s Black on Black: Twentieth-Century African American Writing about
Africa (2000), Keith Cartwright’s Reading Africa into American Literature: Epics,
Fables, and Gothic Tales (2001), and William S. Pollitzer’s The Gullah People and Their
African Heritage (1999) all, in one way or another, communicate an irreconcilable
relationship between African and African American texts through consideration of
African literature and cultures as either a supplement to the richer subject of analysis of
African American literature or an archaic literary and cultural foundation for the African
American literature it inspired. Even aside from these unintended implications within
literary criticism itself, there is also a tendency among readers to read any side-by-side
comparison through a contrastive lens—what the American Psychological Association
refers to as the “contrast effect.”
5
For this reason, I believe the compulsion among
scholars and readers of African and African American texts and cultures to envision the
two as completely detached is so subconscious that we often fail to recognize that
compulsion in our own thinking or in others’.
6
With this subliminal colonial persistence
5
According to the American Psychological Association Dictionary of Psychology, contrast effect is “the
perception of an intensified or heightened difference between two stimuli or sensations when they are
juxtaposed or when one immediately follows the other” (“Contrast Effect”). The APA also lists examples of
this phenomenon, noting the tendency to view red and yellow as opposites when they are presented
simultaneously.
6
This compulsion to impose division between African and African American genres is so strong that it is
even somewhat inevitable in this project. I am bound by the necessary structure of this dissertation, one that
organizes African and African American texts as a side-by-side comparison, my first and second chapters
separately analyzing African literature and African American literature, respectively. While my third
chapter, a comparatist analysis of both African and African American film and television together, works to
16
in keeping Africa out of academia’s Western purview, coming to this understanding of
innate connections between African and African American texts, and how those
connections are illuminated through their representations of twinship, has the power to
cast light on shrouded border crossings related to race, region, and culture, among other
markers of identity repeatedly interrogated throughout African and African American
texts. While a focus solely on the ways in which African and African American texts
demonstrate their kinship in terms of twinship would, on its own, offer a compelling
window through which to view the ways that African diaspora texts similarly achieve the
“art of subversion” specifically related to paradoxical presentations that ultimately disrupt
colonial categorizations, at the heart of this project is necessarily an argument against the
subconscious, often-undetected inclination to impose a rift between African and African
American cultures and texts. The breaking of this oppositional Africa-America binary is
the ultimate empowerment of which I write throughout this project. In exhibiting their
subversive similitude in spite of the chasm often drawn invisibly between them, African
and African American texts break an ingrained colonial tradition of inflicting division and
disharmony where what naturally occurs is congruence. Such is also the case for the
formation of artificial, impermeable partitions for social constructions such as race,
region, and culture; by presenting illustrations of racial, cultural, and regional hybridity,
alongside stereotypical depictions of twinship, the texts I analyze throughout this project
break that American-African binary, even my organization of thoughts within that third chapter is confined
to an academic structure that segregates those thoughts into sections dedicated to African texts and sections
dedicated to African American texts. Throughout the writing of this project, I have strived to strike a
balance between my need to conform to conventional academic formality and my rejection of a
subconscious colonial insistence that analyses of African and African American texts should be segregated.
I hope I have, to some degree, achieved that balance.
17
also break these constructed colonial binaries, paving the way for the communication of
other anti-stereotypical messaging, which I will explain in my analyses of these texts.
The notion of African and African American texts’ shared potential for fracturing
traditional racial, regional, and cultural binary constructions is well-studied. Carol
Sicherman’s “Ngugi’s Colonial Education . . . of the Mind,” Keith Clark’s “A Distaff
Dream Deferred? Ann Petry and the Art of Subversion,” Oliver Barlet’s African Cinemas:
Decolonizing the Gaze (2000) and Michael Boyce Gillespie’s Film Blackness: American
Cinema and the Idea of Black Film (2016) are only a few well-cited examples out of the
plethora of scholarship that presents the idea of African and African American texts’
inherent rejections of such colonial binaries tied to markers of cultural, racial, and
regional identities. The concept of African diaspora texts as innate resistance texts,
smudging clear-cut colonial designations for cultural, regional, and racial constructions
and reconfiguring those structures to include hybrid identities, is supported by and
contributes to postcolonial methodologies and theories related to racial, cultural, and
national merging. The work of critical theorist Homi Bhabha first comes to mind with his
ideas of “third spaces” in which cultural and racial identities are understood differently
and reimagined, evoking colonial anxiety through the presentation of hybridity. For
Bhabha, third spaces are places of hybridity, “figuratively speaking, where the
construction of a political object that is new, neither the one nor the other, properly
alienates our political action . . .” (25 Location of Culture). Bhabha also describes
hybridity as “a difference ‘within’ a subject that inhabits the rim of an ‘in-between’
reality” (13). Bhabha’s concept of hybridity offers one foundational description for the
presentation of identities that I believe make African and African American texts a
18
rejection of colonial thought. In their presentations of hybridized characters and
circumstances that exhibit such “‘in-between’ realities,” African and African American
literature, film, and television of the last century, I believe, perpetually evoke the colonial
anxiety Bhabha describes. Therefore, Bhabha’s notions of hybridity and the ambivalence
that hybridity produces, along with the conceptions of hybridity developed by other
scholars, from its foundations to its more recent critiques, offer a framing for
understanding the cultural, racial, and regional intersections that African diaspora texts
consistently present, as well as how depictions of stereotypical twinship, in light of those
essential portrayals of hybridity, become especially ironic.
While not pertaining to South African subjects, like Bhabha’s work, Chicana,
cultural, and queer theorist Gloria Anzaldúa focuses on Mexican-American identities in
also contributing to this understanding of texts that present cultural and racial hybridity as
natural political disruptions. Anzaldúa contemplates this subversive hybridity, even
creating a literary symbol of hybridity, as she uses the figure of the sea as a third-space
representation of the ultimate arbitrariness of synthetic colonial borders: “This is my
home / this thin edge of / barbwire. But the skin of the earth is seamless. / The sea cannot
be fenced, / el mar does not stop at borders. / To show the white man what she thought of
his arrogance / Yemaya blew that wire fence down” (Borderlands 25). Anzaldúa’s
personification of Yemaya as the demolishment of physical borders aligns with similar
conceptions of the subversion of borders within one’s own identity, such as racial,
national, and cultural identities. Anzaldúa also discusses fluidity pertaining to the
construction of gender, personally recounting her own community’s spectacularization
and social rejection of a woman who is intersex, whose physical body challenges the
19
partitions that divide gender into a traditionally neat binary. Anzaldúa’s descriptions of
the power individual people possess, just by their existences, to throw colonial
categorizations into disarray, of course, defines people who reside on both sides, or in the
middle, of racial, national, and ethnic binaries. Anzaldúa uses her personal experience as
a “mestiza”—a Mexican American woman”—as proof of this colonial disruption.
Anzaldúa describes la mestiza as, “Stubborn, persevering, impenetrable as stone, yet
possessing a malleability that renders [them] unbreakable” (64). Anzaldua continues,
“[They], the mestizas and mestizos, will remain” (64). In this description, Anzaldúa
presents hybridized people as directly counter to the unyielding peripheries they reject,
thereby, like Bhabha, proposing the notion not only that identities that straddle
geographic, cultural, racial, and linguistic borders exist but that the refusal to be defined
by any single, fixed, categorical marker of identity actively destabilizes those
colonialism-rooted identity categories. In this same spirit as Anzaldúa’s regard for the
mestizas and mestizos as survivors against a colonial effort to erase them, I adopt
Anzaldúa’s ideas of hybridity in my assertion that the African and African American texts
I analyze in this dissertation express hybrid identities and environments that make them
inherently colonial resistance texts.
Political scientist Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (1983) also
extends this idea of hybridity as, in itself, a subversion of man-made cultural and regional
borders, drawing on the work of Walter Benjamin, Victor Turner, and Erich Auerbach in
his interpretations of languages as innately hybridized. For Anderson, nations are
fictional communities that project synthesized images of political power and
homogeneity among their citizens, and languages are essential in maintaining those
20
smokescreen projections. Anderson writes, “It is always a mistake to treat languages in
the way that certain nationalist ideologues treat them—as emblems of nation-ness, like
flags, costumes, folk-dances, and the rest” (133). Anderson further explains that “[m]uch
of the most important thing about language is its capacity for generating imagined
communities building in effect particular solidarities” and that “imperial languages are
still vernaculars, and thus particular vernaculars among many” (134). Like people, for
Anderson, languages are, in reality, a merging of several standardized, colloquial, and
external forms. This notion of hybridized languages presents yet another illustration of
the inbuilt power of hybridity to oppose notions of purity essential to colonial thought.
Like Anderson, I adhere to the notion of anti-colonial power created through hybridized
cultural aspects, like language.
This project builds upon these foundational concepts of hybridity while also
recognizing the ways these theories, among others related to hybridity, have been
augmented and challenged over time. Such criticism emerged during and shortly after the
birth of these fundamental understandings of hybridity. In Colonial Desire: Hybridity in
Theory, Culture and Race (1995), for example, Robert Young opposes the notion of
hybridity as a false assertion of a shared postcolonial experience that obscures the
complexities and essential features of individual cultures. For Young, this obfuscation
occurs through “a tendency . . . to de-historicize and de-locate cultures from their
temporal, spatial, geographical and linguistic contexts, and to lead to an abstract,
globalized concept of the textual” (163). More recently, several critics, such as Pnina
21
Werbner, Jonathan Friedman, and Shalini Puri,
7
find similar faults in early subscriptions
to notions of a sweeping de-historicizing, displacing hybridity. These critiques also point
to the assumption of the existence of naturally “pure” cultures that hybridity unsettles.
Others, such as Gerry Smith in “The Politics of Hybridity: Some Problems with Crossing
the Border,” have noted that the adoption of Bhabha’s understandings of hybridity has led
recent postcolonial theorists to gloss over their own neo-colonialist authority in their
recognition of hybridity as cultural resistance. This dissertation recognizes the validity of
these critiques while also cohering to an essential tenet shared by Bhabha, Anzaldúa, and
Anderson—the communication of the permeability of racial, cultural, and geographic
borders. Particularly challenging the idea of cultural hybridity as imagining prior
unadulterated cultures, anthropologist Pnina Werbner writes, “Against that I pose the
possibility that cultures may be grasped as porous, constantly changing and borrowing,
while nevertheless being able to retain at any particular historical moment the capacity to
shock through deliberate conflations and subversions of sanctified orderings” (134). This,
I argue, is a part of the “art of subversion” that I believe the texts I analyze in this project
consistently perform. Through their depictions of racial, cultural, and regional fluidity, I
believe these works demonstrate a common presentation of hybrid characters and
conditions that naturally pushes back against colonial outlooks that would deem such
formulations intolerable or impossible.
7
Friedman, Jonathan. “Situating Hybridity: The Positional Logic of a Discourse.” Structure, Culture, and
History: Recent Issues in a Social Theory, 2002, pp. 6-147.
Puri, Shalini. “Theorizing Hybridity: The Post-Nationalist Moment.” The Caribbean Postcolonial: Social
Equality, Post/Nationalism, and Cultural Hybridity, 2004, pp. 19-41.
Werbner, Pnina. “The Limits of Cultural Hybridity: On Ritual Monster, Poetic Licence and Contested
Postcolonial Publications.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, vol. 7, no. 1, 2001, pp.
133-152.
22
As strictly an acknowledgment of the porousness of the constructions of race,
region, and culture, among other constructions, hybridity is clearly revealed to inherently
resist colonial perceptions pertaining to hierarchal, pure structures for subdividing race,
region, and culture. In this project, my hope is to establish the ways that African diaspora
texts—in this case, African and African American texts specifically—possess a shared
spirit of subversion that is necessarily tied to representations of hybridity. It is my
contention that the texts I examine in each of the following chapters exhibit not just the
possibility, or inevitability, of their rejections of colonial conceptions of “purity” with
regard to race, region, and culture; these texts’ paradoxical treatment of twinship as a
stereotype that reflects a resistance to traditional conceptual confines for race, region, and
culture, among other constructions, offers an exemplification of how that subversion
works. Again, it is my belief that this colonial subversion occurs specifically through the
use of paradoxes. As for the several texts I analyze in this dissertation, the paradox at
play, perhaps among other paradoxes, is the paradox of twins. Twins are a paradox in
more than one form. Within the performative structure of their twinship, twins act out
their similitude or strict difference often in accordance with social expectations,
revealing, ironically, the biological and social nature of the construction of twinship.
Through this performance, twins inhabit the role of a paradoxical binary, a spectacle of
likeness that naturally invites contrast; we place twins together, in a side-by-side dyad,
specifically to point out their differences. Because of this natural, paradoxical compulsion
to draw distinctions between these identical, paired beings, twins are also representative
of the “third space” that Bhabha, Anzaldúa, and others have discussed as predominant to
their understandings of hybridity—an in-between reality that defies strict categorization
23
as either fully similar or fully different. In this way, twins represent an “almost but not
quite” indeterminacy that I read as a tropified reflection of hybridity in its many forms—
namely, for this project’s purposes, cultural, racial, and regional hybridity.
As a contemporary idea that transcends strict categorizations for race, region, and
culture, hybridity is a stringent rejection of colonial binaries and categorical groupings
meant to separate and subjugate. As I read twins as a reflection of that hybridity, the texts
I analyze in this project that all feature twinship, I argue, also contain reflections of this
rejection of colonial classifications. Paradoxically, however, this rejection occurs through
a subscription to rigorous classificatory representations of twinship. Within their
subscriptions to stereotypes associated with twins—their typecast depictions of twins as
either exactly identical, entirely opposite, subordinate to humans, or superior to them—
the texts at the heart of this project reveal an essence of colonial defiance that ties them
together. My reading of these texts as intimately entangled challenges notions that insist
upon the hopeless, complete division of African and African American cultures due to the
lasting devastations of slavery, a pessimism that, I believe, grants the Middle Passage far
too much power and renders black authors and creators useless in rejecting colonial
constructions and racist thoughts. In this understanding, I interpret African and African
American literature as twins themselves, performing an alikeness that defies their
unconsciously implicit, strict contrasting designations.
Scope and Personal Limitations
The academic boundaries of this project limit my writing to the objective.
Throughout this dissertation, I write about twinship as a third-party observer, writing
24
about twins as if they are a biological, psychological, and sociological phenomenon that
impacts cultures but has not impacted me personally. In writing in this detached way, I
align myself with most of the scholars I cite throughout the project—scholars who
approach twinship through a purely fact-based lens. However, this objectivity feels, in
some sense, like a façade, given my own personal relationship with the subject of
twinship. I am a twin. I have an intimate relationship to the harms of the twinship
stereotypes I recognize, and I identify deeply with the indescribably close connections
many of the twin figures I analyze are portrayed as possessing. The fact that I have a twin
is one of the most important parts—maybe the most important part—of my personal
identity, and I have found the task of dissecting twinship, drawing the binary in my own
mind between personal experience and neutral scholarly analysis, to be an impossible
task. Equally impossible is my obligation now to describe how my personal experience
with twinship has motivated and informed this project with formal language that leaves
no room for the mushy-gushy emotions that sparked my passion for this work. To state
things simply, I love my twin, and I love being a twin. This has not always been the case.
When my sister and I were young, we loathed any allusion, no matter the subtly, to the
fact of our physical likeness. In spite of our identical twinship, we resented the stares
in supermarkets, the incessant “Are you twins?” from strangers, our mother’s insistence
that we wear the same outfits, or the color-inverted pairings we were forced to sport once
we grew old enough to protest against clothes that made us completely indistinguishable.
From our earliest consciousness of our existence in the world, we were aware, and
persistently reminded, of our physical similitude and the sociocultural expectations that
accompanied it. We were, however, (undoubtedly because of our twinship) also keenly
25
aware of our differences—that my sister was a picky eater, and I wasn’t; that she was
unflinchingly sociable, and I was reserved; that she, a natural musician, liked piano
ballads and smooth jazz, while I preferred hard rock—and for a large portion of our
childhood, we resisted the performance of sameness that seemed to be demanded of our
twinship. This aversion to the projection of sameness that so often disregarded our
individuality became less fervent with age, however, and by our adolescence, we had
learned to use our resemblance to our advantage, switching places to take tests in each
other’s classes or to play pranks on our friends and significant others for our own
amusement. For us, the performance of twinship became, and is to this day, a kind of
game of which we, in our secret knowledge of our distinguishability, our unalikeness, are
always the winners. This lifetime of experiencing the joys and tribulations of being a twin
is what has led me to my observations of the paradoxical use of twinship for the purpose
of achieving empowerment, specifically surrounding the reclamation of potentially
damaging stereotypes. This is my personal motivation for the subject of my writing, and
it informs and enriches the work of this project in ways that I could not possibly articulate
or even understand.
I am similarly limited in my ability and space to recall and give rightful
recognition to all of the countless works that have shaped my knowledge as I have
written my way through this project. One of the most notable among these works is
Christopher N. Okonkwo’s Kindred Spirits (2022), a study of the rich and complex
connections between the writing of Chinua Achebe and Toni Morrison. Not only does
Okonkwo acknowledge the overwhelming absence of scholarship on Morrison’s and
Achebe’s literary parallels, especially given Morrison’s explicit recognition of Achebe’s
26
influence on her work; Okonkwo also notices a lack of literature surrounding the topic of
Achebe’s influence on Western writers in general. Reading Achebe and Morrison as
“kindred spirits,” Okonkwo sets out to achieve multiple purposes, namely, to both record
the significant parallels between both authors and their works and illuminate the
potential, theoretical reasons for these interrelations. As my work also seeks to chronicle
and analyze parallels between African and African American fiction—including works by
both Achebe and Morrison—in leading me to discern a familial kinship between works
out of Africa and African America, my work is undoubtedly influenced by Okonkwo’s
teachings, in both this groundbreaking study and his work as a trusted mentor and
advisor. Particularly, I am drawn to Okonkwo’s invocation of Ernest A. Champion’s Mr.
Baldwin, I Presume, in which Champion writes, “Colonialism and slavery are twins that
have been separated since birth but have lived parallel lives” (qtd. in Okonkwo 78). It is
in this same spirit that I read the twins-centered texts I analyze in this project as twinned
themselves, as having lived parallel, even if separated, lives.
Chapter Overviews
Because of the multi-genre, multi-media scope of this dissertation, each chapter of
the project contains numerous primary texts for analysis. I have divided this project into
three analytical chapters with an introduction and a conclusion that supplements these
analyses. The following are synopses of each chapter in this dissertation:
Chapter One: “‘Twinocide’ and Twin Celebration: How Twins Illuminate Racial,
Cultural, and Regional Hybridity in African Literature”
27
In this chapter, I focus on representations of twinship in African literature,
exploring the literary, thematic, and cosmological connections across twentieth- and
twenty-first-century African novels that feature twin characters. The books I analyze in
this chapter are Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958), Buchi Emecheta’s The Joys
of Motherhood (1979), Mosibudi Mangena’s A Twin World (1996), Chimamanda Ngozi
Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), and Taiye Selasi’s Ghana Must Go (2013). The
twins in these novels, I argue, function as largely typecast figures that reveal a trend
among African authors of relying on adherences to firm stereotypical categories
paradoxically in order to subvert colonial imaginaries that depend on that same kind of
categorical firmness; for this chapter, as for this dissertation as a whole, I allude
particularly to the constructions of race, region, and culture in referencing these
categorically firm imaginaries that I believe these novels subvert. In this subversion, I
argue, these notions of fixed racial, regional, and cultural binaries are replaced by
depictions of the characters’ hybridized racial, regional, and cultural identities, as well as
portrayals of communities and environments containing amalgamations of races and
cultures. Like its following chapters, this first chapter conveys the ways that the twins
novels at the center of my analyses cleverly rely on perpetuations of stereotypes in
paradoxically communicating rather avant-garde rejections of racial, regional, and
cultural binaries essential to white superiority. In their presentations of twinship—a
paradox in and of its itself in the ways twins represent both sameness and difference and
both individual singularity and duality—the novels point to a general notion of hybridity
as a blending of differences among races, regions, and cultures that gives the novels an
anti-colonial air of resistance. The parallels between these paradoxical African
28
employments of twinship and the paradoxical use of twinship as a trope in African
American novels become apparent in my second chapter.
Chapter Two: “Powerful Pairs: Tales of Crossed Racial, Regional, and Cultural Lines in
African American Twin Literature”
In this chapter, I focus on representations of twinship in African American literary
fiction, examining the thematic and representative parallels among African American
literature with twin characters and noting the possibility of shared mythological roots
among twinship representations across African American and African texts. The primary
books I study in this chapter are William Melvin Kelley’s dem (1967); Toni Morrison’s
Paradise (1998), A Mercy (2008), and God Help the Child (2015); Jesmyn Ward’s Where
the Line Bleeds (2008); and Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half (2020). As in my first
chapter, I explore the paradoxical uses of stereotypical depictions of twins in these novels
for the sake of achieving hybridity-centered messages that break colonial imaginaries
regarding cultural, regional, and racial “purity” and segregations. Also like my research
in Chapter One, I have found very few who discuss twinship within these novels in ways
that are not stereotypical themselves; in other words, those who note the presence of
twins in these texts at all often do so in the same ways scholars of twins write about
twinship—as a way to discuss how twins reveal other characters or phenomena in the
novel. Rarely do scholars focus on the twins themselves—how they are conveyed, the
realism with which they are conveyed, and how they are not only employed as a
stereotypical symbol but how, through that adherence to rigid stereotyping surrounding
twinship, the twins convey breakable binaries regarding culture, region, and race.
29
Virtually no one, from my observations, has focused on the twins in these texts as key
figures in the subversion of colonialist thinking. In asserting this perspective, I again rely,
in part, on parts of Bhabha, Anzaldúa’s, and Anderson’s foundational theories as key
components of my postcolonial theoretical lens pertaining to notions of hybridity,
mimicry, and cultural and racial ambivalence. My ultimate conclusion for this chapter is
that within their paradoxical use of twins’ stereotypes in the subversion of colonial
binaries related to racial, regional, and cultural constructions, this literature in this chapter
demonstrates the “psychic unity” between it and the African literature I examine in the
previous chapter. In this way, this second chapter solidifies the idea of African and
African literature as twins themselves, who are, like twinned siblings, constantly, often
unconsciously, viewed as contrasting entities and are empowered through their
performance of similitude; in this case, as the “twin” genre to African literature, African
American literature adopts the same subscription to twin figures that we see in African
literature, and through this use of the stereotypical, African American literature, like the
African literature examined in Chapter One, is empowered to reflect resistant,
unconventional binary breakages related to race, culture, and region that challenge
colonial perceptions of those constructions.
Chapter Three: “Nollywood and Disney Duos: Merged Racial, Regional, and Cultural
Borders in African and African American Film and Television Featuring Twins”
In my third analytical chapter, I discuss both African and African American
cinematic and television representations of twinship. For this analysis, I examine the
following texts: Nollywood films and series Twins of Fire (2020) and Love’s Lies (2023);
30
African American films and series Black-ish (2014-2022), Us (2019), and Euphoria
(2019-2022); and children’s films and series Sister, Sister (1994-1999), The Proud Family
(2001-2005), and Twitches (2005). This third chapter analyzes twinship in these films and
television series, using a theoretical framing comprised of the postcolonial theories from
the previous chapters, as well as film theories within studies of the horror genre, such as
Noël Carroll’s classic work The Philosophy of Horror: Or, Paradoxes of the Heart
(1990). Contributing a filmic focus to the work of the previous two chapters, this chapter
offers a comparatist view of African and African American films and television featuring
twin figures, ultimately arguing that their use of the stereotypes of twinship ironically
points to unconventional portrayals of racial, regional, and cultural permeability. Like the
previous chapters, I argue that this paradoxical employment of twinship exhibits the
shared spirit of subversion among African and African American texts. As this chapter
establishes this dissertation as a multi-media project, this paradoxical employment of the
stereotypical with the ultimate effect of subversion of stringent colonial binaries is
revealed to be shared across continents, genres, and even media. This idea of a shared
reliance on potentially harmful single narratives for the sake of shattering colonial
binaries has, to my researched knowledge, been posed by no other comparative, multi-
media account of African and African American texts. This chapter enables the project to
break the binary between literature and cinema/television, a crucial bridging of media
divisions that demonstrates that the “art of subversion” is tied less to any one particular
form of art and more to a kindred anti-colonial spirit among black authors and creators.
31
Through these chapters examining some of Africa’s and America’s most popular
literary, cinematic, and televised portrayals of twinship,
8
I hope to offer an extensive
trans-media, trans-continental study that uncovers a multitude of realities. At the outset,
this project seeks to acknowledge the representations of twinship in our cultural
imaginary, as well as the potentially harmful impacts of these representations on the
formation of twins’ identities. Like biological twins, however, African and African
American creators alike employ the stereotypes associated with twinship, paradoxically,
in ways that lead to, or at least reflect, rejections of single narratives, in the case of this
project, for the constructions of race, region, and culture specifically. My contention is
that each of the texts I analyze in this project are emboldened to reject binary thinking for
the constructions of race, region, and culture, replacing that classificatory thought with
hybridized racial, regional, and cultural depictions. In this subversion of strict categories
for race, region, and culture through portrayals of hybridity, these novels, I argue, possess
a shared boundary-breaking spirit that makes them anti-colonial. Pinpointing a reliance
on paradoxes (in the case of these texts, the paradox of twinship) as a key element within
that subversion offers an important glimpse into not only how this subversion works but
how to ignite effective future colonial resistance, through art and beyond. For these
reasons, I believe Breakable Binaries to be a powerful intervention in a number of fields,
including, but not limited to, literary studies, film studies, comparative literature,
transatlantic studies, cultural studies, and media discourse.
8
The texts I have handpicked to study in this dissertation (listed in my chapter overviews above) are merely
a smattering of twins selections that appear to be incredibly popular. Even among these famous examples,
there are several that I have consciously redacted for the sake of length, as well as a few that I have, I am
sure, unconsciously omitted.
32
CHAPTER ONE
“Twinocide” and Twin Celebration: How Twins Illuminate Racial, Cultural and Regional
Hybridity in African Literature
In what is arguably the most world-renowned African novel in all of modern
African literature, Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe expresses the clashing of cultures
between Igbo traditions and colonial forces. One massive factor in this novel’s
achievement of global success is Achebe’s ability to capture the repercussions of this
cultural collision with a depth that defies single narratives about either Igbo people or the
colonial powers flooding West Africa. Achebe is undaunted in his whole-picture
illustrations of both groups, including stereotypical images of the Igbo as uncivilized and
the colonists as invasive and parasitic. Within this comprehensive view of the colonial
takeover in Umuofia, Achebe embeds an image of twins and their treatment among the
Igbo people. Achebe writes, “They were returning home with baskets of yams from a
distant farm across the stream when they heard the voice of an infant crying in the thick
forest. A sudden hush had fallen on the women . . . Nwoye had heard that twins were put
in earthenware pots and thrown away in the forest, but he had never yet come across
them” (301). In referencing this very real, dark history of the inhumane treatment of
twins among the Igbo, Achebe, perhaps unavoidably, leaves room for misreadings of this
scene as a reflection of typical life in Nigeria—a stereotypical view of African barbarians
who kill their own people under the ritual command of nonsensical tribal codes. Such
interpretations fail to acknowledge Achebe’s brilliant artistry in the ways he employs the
stereotypical, ironically, for the purpose of pushing back against single narratives. The
twin killings in Things Fall Apart are not Achebe’s only use of the stereotypical as a
33
reflection of his novels’ rather un-stereotypical themes. In his use of the character of
Ezeulu in Arrow of God (1964), for instance, Achebe paints a vibrant image of political
corruption and his protagonist Okonkwo’s struggles to reconcile his cultural traditions
with the new progressive colonial modernity. While this depiction relies on narrow views
of Africans’ stuck-in-the-past mentalities that make them resistant to political or social
progression, Achebe’s tactic of leaning into such stereotypes allows him to ultimately
convey the complexities of cultural identities and ties to tribal traditions that are deeply
meaningful, not nonsensical. In the same way, Achebe’s portrayal of the twin killings in
Things Fall Apart might appear, at first glance, to be a perpetuation of stereotypes that
communicate harmful, one-dimensional narratives about both Africans and twins;
however, it is within his use of the stereotypical that Achebe’s ultimate sketch of the
clashes between colonial modernity and African tradition takes form. It is a sizeable
image, encompassing the moral failings of both sides of the African/colonial-European
binary, a refusal to smear either side as completely unscrupulous. With this overall
rejection of a strict moral binary between African and colonial forces, the twin deaths
mark a critical moment in the novel as the instigator of Nwoye’s reckoning not with the
clashing differences between the cultures but with their amoral similarities. In this way,
Achebe’s twins function not only as a symbol of duality that signifies contrasting cultural
ideologies and traditions; they also signify the breaking of supposedly strict and fixed
conceptual borders segregating regions, races, and cultures. This instance of twinship in
one of (if not the) most famous piece(s) of contemporary African literature exemplifies
the trend among African writers of using twinship as a caricatured trope for the sake of
creating images and ideas that break stereotypes through the revelation of hybridity. In
34
the ways that twins signify a paradoxical sameness amidst difference and separateness
alongside duality, twins are naturally reflective of the kind of hybridity that I believe
African literature typically depicts—a blurring of binary divides that establish firm
identity categories based on colonial imaginaries; specific to this chapter, those
imaginaries fix race, region, and culture as constructions with impermeable partitions.
Africa is home to what are the most prominent natural occurrences of twins. And
West Africa, in particular, is also home to what are, perhaps, the most radical cultural
obsessions with twins. This cultural fixation extends, too, to African narratives, both in
recent literature and in oral mythologies. Within this literary and cosmological infatuation
with twins throughout West African societies and cultures, there exists a reliable
adherence to representational categories into which I believe all of the twin figures I
analyze in this chapter can be classified: These categories are as follows: a.) Eerily
similar twins, or twinship as freakish, supernatural, or subhuman; b.) Strikingly dissimilar
twins, or twinship in which the twins often appear as photographic negatives of each
other; or c.) Metaphorical or figurative twins; this is twinship that is not biological but is
either conceptualized as spiritual or fictive twinship or is viewed as a representation of
duality that holds the potential for a discernable, plausible reading of twinship based on
analysis of the ways two in a pair behave according to “twinny” conventions. The novels
I will analyze in this chapter exemplify these stereotypical trends, each containing twin
figures that neatly align with one or more of these categorical groupings. In each of these
works, however, the propagation of these stereotypical notions of twinship also,
ironically, leads to the illumination of innovative, nonconformist ideas related to the
conceptions of race, region, and culture—themes that are typically perceived as
35
impermeable but, in these novels, are presented as fluid and pervious. Studying this ironic
use of stereotypes for defining twinship within these texts that ultimately communicate
rejections of single narratives allows for an examination of the use of paradoxes as an
essential component within the process of what I refer to as “the art of subversion” in
African diaspora texts.
The recognition of the prevalence of twinship within African literary and oral
traditions is, on its own, not surprising; neither is the recognition of specifically African
twinship as a paradoxical dualism. Twin studies, as an intellectual field, is filled with
scholars who make note of this ironic nature of twins, their representations, and their
treatment in Africa. For instance, Philip M. Peek studies twins divination systems and
other cultural representations of twinship throughout African and diaspora cultures.
Discussing the observable differences between twins in West African and Western
representations of twinship, Peek writes, “West African twin imagery has abandoned the
negative aspects twins once conveyed, while retaining the paradoxical aspects. . .
Traditional and mythical African meanings of twins do not compete with religions
(Christianity and Islam) or cultures adopted from Western countries” (Double Trouble,
152). Peek goes on to say that “[West Africans] can also believe in two different religions
(an ancient African one and a recent African one) without seeing any conflict between
them, indeed finding connections, especially concerning twins” (Double Trouble, 152).
While in this assertion, Peek does not name a specific West African culture, Peek makes a
point of saying that twins are present in the religious histories of every culture. Peek’s
observations of the paradox that is the use of strictly conventional representations of
twins within unconventional religious convergences coincide with, and yet also seem to
36
contradict, Elisha P. Renne’s and Misty L. Bastian’s reviews of twinship literature
surrounding Africa, as they explain the paradoxical “two-sided dissonance of social life”
among Yoruba twins, noting “the tendency toward opposed dualisms when social
theorists reconsider twins; namely, that interpretations of twins often reflect two opposing
cosmologies with their concomitant moral visions of the world” (Reviewing Twinship, 4).
Reminding of popular interpretations of Achebe’s use of twinship, Renne and Bastian
further say that, “the perspective of those who follow an African traditional religion may
be in dualistic opposition to the perspective of those who have converted to Christianity,
whose different beliefs underwrite their distinctive interpretations of twins” (Reviewing
Twinship, 4). Renne and Bastian list work from as early as the 1920s, from Isaac Shapera,
along with studies from Evans-Pritchard (1956) and Turner (1969) as research that has
consistently noted this “paradoxical nature of twinship for social structure” (Reviewing
Twinship, 1). Donna Lee Davis also recognizes the work of Turner, as a significant
contribution to understandings of African twins as paradoxical, specifically in her
discussion of Ndembu twins. Matthew Schoffeleers likewise quotes Turner in his
discussion of the common ironic representation of twins, among the Ndembu and many
others, as both animals and deities: “Almost everywhere in tribal society they are hard to
fit into the ideal model of the social structure, but one of the paradoxes of twinship is that
it sometimes becomes associated with rituals that exhibit the fundamental principles of
that structure” (qtd. in “Twins in Unilateral Figures,” 355). Schoffeleers also cites René
Girard’s perceptions of this “classificatory confusion” surrounding twinship, explaining
that this confusion “inspire[s] fear above all because [twins] seem to embody the process
37
of undifferentiation that is characteristic of a situation of uncontrolled rivalry and
violence” (qtd. in “Twins in Unilateral Figures,” 358).
Each of the aforementioned studies evidences not just the discernable paradoxical
nature of twinship; in their specific references to African cultures, these works also seem
to point to the paradoxical nature of conceptions and representations of twinship out of
Africa in particular. Pivotally, what I believe this trend of the recognition of twinship
incongruities specifically within African cultures demonstrates, and what few other
scholars, if any, have seemed to mention with any true significance, is the possibility of
the art of subversion particular to Africa as inherently related to paradoxes. In other
words, because twinship itself is a paradox, as the above research establishes, I believe
Africa’s persistent gravitation towards twinship in its cultural—and particular to this
chapter, literary—productions can be explained by the supposition that African
expressions of resistance themselves are completely tethered to paradoxes that create
haziness and amalgamations where, traditionally speaking, there ought to be firm borders
and segregations with regard to conceptions of race, region, and culture, among other
constructions. In their representation of contradictory duality (that is, their simultaneous
denotations of sameness and difference and their representations as coexisting
opposites—animals and deities, or evil and morally good, for examples), twins in African
literature, as in African diaspora literature, subvert racial, regional, and cultural binaries
by presenting their borders as permeable, undermining notions of the racial, regional, or
cultural exclusivity, which are essential to ideas of white superiority.
This notion of the paradoxical nature of African subversion of conventional
binaries is consistent with a slew of theoretical work related to hybrid identities as modes
38
of colonial rejection. Most immediately, Homi Bhabha provides a seminal example, as
his conceptions of ambivalence created through hybridity form the basis of many other
postcolonial theoretical notions related to hybridity. In Bhabha’s ideas of colonial
mimicry, or the colonial subject’s adoption of characteristics supposedly essential to the
colonizer—Bhabha speaks of the hybridized colonial subject, who, through this
impersonation, are “stricken by an indeterminacy,” which, for Bhabha, denotes that
“mimicry emerges as the representation of a difference that is itself a process of
disavowal” (“Of Mimicry and Man,” 126). In explaining this process through which the
strict colonizer-colonized binary becomes muddled, as the colonial subject’s mimicry of
colonial attributes renders those attributes meaningless to the establishment of imperial
dominance, Bhabha invokes the work of Samuel Weber, who describes the ambivalence
created through such nullifying imitation as a kind of castration through confusion
associated with a colonial subject who is “a subject of difference that is almost the same,
but not quite” (qtd. in “Of Mimicry and Man,” 126). This indeterminacy created through
ambivalence also informs Bhabha’s work surrounding racial and cultural hybridity.
Bhabha cites the poetry of Guillermo Gomez-Pefia as a literary reflection of life on the
Mexico-US border, which Bhabha describes as a third space of resistant to colonial
oppression. Bhabha writes that identities defined by such tangled national boundaries
may be “resistant to [colonialism’s] oppressive, assimilationist technologies” but may
also “deploy the cultural hybridity of their borderline conditions to 'translate', and
therefore reinscribe, the social imaginary of both metropolis and modernity” (Location of
Culture, 6). Bhabha extends this discussion of regional and cultural merging to also
consider racial amalgamation. Using the multiracial, or “coloured,” South African subject
39
as his illustration of racial hybridity, Bhabha writes that “the coloured South African
subject represents a hybridity, a difference 'within', a subject that inhabits the rim of an
'in-between' reality” (Location of Culture, 13). In this way, Bhabha describes multiracial
people themselves as hybridized third spaces that challenge colonial thought regarding
stringent racial, regional, and cultural segregations. Like Bhabha, Néstor García Canclini
also presents hybridized individuals as third spaces in and of themselves, focusing on the
mixing of Spanish, Portuguese, English, French, and American colonizers, along with
enslaved Africans, in his explanation of what he calls “mestizaje” (similar to Gloria
Anzaldúa’s concept of “la mestiza”), or “a foundational process in the societies of the so-
called New World” of cross-cultural contact “in both the biological sense (production of
phenotypes as a result of genetic crossovers) and the cultural sense—mixing of European
habits, beliefs, and forms of thought with those originating from American societies”
(Hybrid Cultures, xxxii). Also like Bhabha, Canclini recognizes the role of ambivalence
in the resistance that is produced out of such hybridity: “It is . . . necessary to understand
[hybridization] in the context of the ambivalences of the globalized mass diffusion and
industrialization of symbolic processes, and of the power conflicts these provoke”
(Hybrid Cultures, 6). These foundational studies of hybridized identities as forms of
colonial defiance offer a helpful starting point for understanding the potential of hybridity
to muddle and, therefore, dismantle neat classifications for race, region, and culture—an
anti-colonial resistance to which the stereotypical twin figures in the novels I analyze in
this chapter give rise.
40
Despite the usefulness of these general conceptions of hybridity, they are certainly
not without challenge.
9
More specific to African hybrid identities, Araba A. Z. Osei-Tutu
replicates understandings of ambivalence as a key factor in the opposition of cultural
binaries, while also pushing back against the notion of the complete cultural displacement
of hybridized people. For Osei-Tutu, there is a fine line between the boundary smudging
that refuses strict categorization and the creation of “African identities that are not
centered in specific linguistic and cultural roots that can be traced back to the continent”
(“African-Centered Hybridity,” 62). Osei-Tutu’s caution surrounding notions of hybridity
as culture-erasing is shared by other African thinkers, such as Kwame Anthony Appiah,
who repeatedly implicitly critiques ideas of cultural hybridity because of the
irreconcilability of African tradition and colonial modernity. Appiah’s and Osei-Tutu’s
criticism of the notion of hybridity as a rejection of colonial classifications demonstrates
the opposition that confronts any literary argument surrounding hybridity. However, some
of Appiah’s critiques of the notion of African hybridity, bolstered by Osei-Tutu’s criticism
of the notion of hybridity as a general concept, I believe, paint an image of Africa as a
place of sweeping cultural purity, a primitive space that remains unscathed by the
corruption of the progressive modern world. In contrast to Appiah’s perception of a
hybridized Africa as invariable across the board, my embrace of the notions of cultural,
racial, and regional hybridity in this chapter acknowledges the cultural, racial, and
regional multiplicity that forms what I broadly refer to as “African” in this chapter.
Therefore, in the construction of my own conceptions of hybridity for this chapter, I am
9
In the introduction of this dissertation, I note additional scholars, mainly in the field of anthropology, who
critique the concept and handling of hybridity in postcolonial discourses. Namely, I mention Jonathan
Friedman, Shalini Puri, and Pnina Werbner.
41
borrowing theoretical fragments from each of the above thinkers, understanding hybridity
as simply a form of colonial resistance tied to markers of identity—specifically racial,
regional, and cultural identity— that does not insist upon the prior existence of racial,
regional, and cultural “purity.”
Pertinent to the literary focus of this chapter, when representations of twins in
African literature wedge their ways into critical discourse at all, there is an assumed
biological or natural predisposition that would seem to make twins an easily reachable
tool for African writers searching to convey everyday life among a population in which
twins are unusually common. Within this assumption, however, is a demeaning
implication of an unconscious, primal instinct of African artistry, as opposed to
assumptions that Western or European fixations on twinship are motivated by more
deliberate, intellectual intentions. In this study, however, I understand twin
representations in African literature to reflect a wisdom and intellect that harkens back to
Africa’s myth-making history. In asserting twinship’s illumination of racial, cultural, and
regional binary subversions in African literature, I am thus also illustrating the
remarkable, intellectual boundary-breaking spirit of the genre of African myth, by which
so many cultural aspects in and out of Africa are inspired.
Because of the prevalence of twin occurrences and fixations in Africa, speaking
of African twinship representations out of any one specific area of Africa would be
reductive. Therefore, my scope for this chapter is fairly broad. My mention of the
literature I will analyze as existing within the genre of “African” literature is not meant as
an all-encompassing description that posits Africa as a single, culture-erasing
conglomerate but, rather, as a way of noting that, while the majority of the literature I will
42
analyze in this chapter is West African, I have also included a few outlying novels.
Although twins are prevalent in all kinds of art, and although twins in African artforms
other than literature also provide evidence for African usages of twins with specific
regard for manifold reconceptualizations, I submit that African novels of the last century
are an ideal microcosm through which to view the aforementioned subversions of racial,
regional, and cultural binaries. Even within this narrowed time window, there is a nearly
countless amount of literature containing twinship. The list of novels on which I am
choosing to focus my analyses in this chapter contains only a small selection of novels
that are so popular that I would be remiss to not acknowledge them. Chinua Achebe’s
Things Fall Apart (1958), Buchi Emecheta’s The Joys of Motherhood (1979), Mosibudi
Mangena’s A Twin World (1996), Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun
(2006), and Taiye Selasi’s Ghana Must Go (2013) collectively construct a model lens
through which the paradoxes essential to both twinship and African subversion of
colonial binaries are illuminated.
Before discussing these contemporary texts, it is important to acknowledge how
these texts have likely been influenced by much older twin narratives. African
mythologies often portray twins as either subordinate species who must be outcast or
abolished, superhumans or spiritual beings who must be revered, or supernatural beings
with often-evil powers. Through explorations of this history, African mythologies are
clearly revealed to place twins in the same paradoxical, stereotypical positions we see in
twins’ representations globally. They are either eerily similar, strikingly opposite,
supernatural, subnatural, or spiritually connected. With so much emphasis placed on the
spiritual or psychic power of twinship, it is surprising that the potential for
43
representations of twinship to illuminate other powerful phenomena, especially in African
literature, has not been harnessed with any notable gravity. I contend that the existence of
stereotypical twinship representations in African mythologies from across the continent
reveal multiple truths: that representative trends are not geographically limited, that they
existed even before they were facsimiled in literature written in English, and that the
global fixation on twinship we see today may very well have been formed out of these
African mythologies, or could have at least been heavily influenced by them.
Yorubaland is a particularly rich site for studying mythological twinship
representations, as well as the biological, cultural, and socioeconomic factors that may
have inspired such representations. Western Nigeria experiences the highest number of
twin births in the world, with the Yoruba birthing twins at about four times the rate of
Europe and at a higher rate than any other Nigerian tribe (Oruene 208). Because of this
high twin rate, Yoruba culture is especially fascinated with twins. When twin births first
began to recur at staggering rates among the Yoruba, it was initially thought to be an
omen of evil, contrasting the normalcy of singular births from singular pregnancies
(Oruene 230-231). Because twin births were first assumed to be the result of multiple,
simultaneous paternities, twin births were regarded as an indication of adultery and were
shunned from society. The expulsion of twins from society also stemmed from
associations between births of multiples and “lower order” animals, such as primates. In a
twist of social rationale, however, because the Yoruba also have the highest infant
mortality rate in addition to their highest twin rate, it is likely that a celebration of twin
births, as opposed to their societal rejection, would have been in the best interest of the
community (Oruene 231). The eventual valuing of twin births may also be accredited to
44
the conception and acceptance of the ibeji throughout Yorubaland. The nature of the
Ibeji—an Orisha which represents twins in Yoruba religion and culture—is rooted in oral
storytelling and communicates twins’ breakthrough between the spirit and human worlds
(231). It is this spiritual breakthrough that we see in several contemporary narratives
containing twins and references, however subtle or overt, to Yoruba culture.
The early social marginalization of twins in the history of the Yoruba can be seen
again, with much more fervor, in the historic treatment of twins among another of
Nigeria’s major groups, the Igbo-speaking people. As in Yoruba culture, twins in Ontisha
culture, for instance, became associated with evil and animality. These associations led to
the most famous cases of twin ostracization and, what is worse, twin killings (again, most
famously referenced in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart). The cosmological reasons for this
aversion to twinship among Igbo-speaking people are rooted in beliefs that twins were
(nso ani) abominations against the earth diety Ala/Ani (Bastian 13). Here, it must be
noted that this recounting of cosmological history—and all the mythologies I explore in
this chapter—is, in all probability, influenced by colonial narratives communicated
through popular ethnographic accounts. From them we’ve come to learn much of Africa’s
mythological histories and often overlook the complexities of what might be
simplistically viewed as exoticism. While missionaries of imperial Christianity believed
twins were a gift from God, Ontisha Igbo elders believed strongly that the birth of twins
was an abomination and should be eradicated to avoid the corruption of society” (Bastian
15). Much more recently, twin killings are no longer a popular means of ridding Ontisha
culture of twinship’s presence; however, according to Bastian, there remains a persistent
twin-free aspiration that typically keeps many twins either constantly disguised as
45
singletons or outcast from everyday Igbo society. It is this same treatment of twinship as
a stereotypical trope—a pairing who is socially outcast, publicly celebrated as divine, or
completely ignored—that we see in contemporary works containing figures of twins.
These mythologies, and the ones described below, will become extremely important later
in this chapter and project, as these narrative overlaps in the treatment of twinship reveal
a “twinship” between African and African American texts themselves—one that is rooted
in these pigeonhole narratives but for the sake of the subversion of colonial thinking
related, in this project, to race, region, and culture.
Religious, social, and economic factors also played a large role in the declines and
increases in births and cultural representations of twins for the Kedjom people of the
Cameroon Grassfields. For the Kedjom, children are believed to possess mystical powers
to morph or transform themselves or to disappear (fentah) (Bastian and Renne 5). These
beliefs, along with Cameroon’s declining economy that made child care and education
difficult, likely led to increased fixations on twinship (Bastian and Renne 5). Conceptions
of twinship as related to psychic powers and connections originating in childhood are
present also in modern-day Dogondoutchi—a Niger Hause-speaking commune with
strongly held beliefs about the power of twins, particularly in the forms of witch-like
behaviors, such as invisible flight for meetings with other interstitial beings and the
psychic ability to harm one another (Bastian and Renne 6).
Religious beliefs surrounding children also impact perceptions of twinship for the
Dogon of Mali. Among the Dogon, twin births are celebrated with displays of religious
praise, symbolizing the dualities of past and present, humanity and divinity, and selling
and buying (Onunwa 625). In a similar gesture of religious celebration, in the Bamenda
46
Grassland to the North of Bangwa of the Cameroons, twins are often referred to as
“children of God” (Onunwa 624). Twins’ religious symbolism is also evident in twin-
centered artistry out of Central Africa, particularly among the Luba and their images of
combined male-female oracles (Peek 20) and artwork out of the Isoko region of Bayelsa
State Nigeria, such as personal shrines for one’s spiritual doubles, oma and iyri, and
mythological twins art from the Bamana, Fon, Hausa, and Senufo, all of which
demonstrate deep reflections on balance and human connection (Peek 16).
All of these mythological histories are significant in that they, among many
others, reveal a deep-rooted tradition of using twinship, for either spiritual, religious, or
socioeconomic reasons, as symbolic reflections of African life.
10
In this way, the
convention of twins’ usefulness as helpful figures in describing and defining aspects of
the world has clear roots in oral traditions across regional and cultural borders, and these
mythologies are categorizable within the same overarching themes in representations of
twins we see today across Africa and the diaspora; that is, mythological trends in twins’
representations as either eerily similar (perpetuated, for example, by identical Ere ibeji
figures); completely opposite (such as images of male-female twins of the Luba);
superhuman (evidenced by the celebration of twins among the Yoruba and the Dogon);
subhuman (demonstrated by the historic oppression of twins out of Igbo society); and
psychically powerful and connected (such as the belief in twins’ psychic powers among
the Kedjom) are all clearly aligned with contemporary trends in twinship representations
10
Several twins scholars in various fields acknowledge twins’ historic usefulness as a trope to reflect
various aspects of life, from societal norms to political ideologies. While I provide a more extensive
overview of this scholarship in the introduction of this dissertation, a few of these scholars are Karen Dillon
in The Spectacle of Twinship in American Literature and Pop Culture and Penelope Farmer in Two, or the
Book of Twins.
47
specifically in African diaspora texts. This alignment reveals African oral traditions to be
a possible foundation, or at least a significant influence, for global representations of
twinship, which are reflected in the novels I will now analyze for their hybridized
subversion of colonial purity ideals, paradoxically, through their employment of typecast
depictions, such as stereotypes for twins.
Things Fall Apart
Chinua Achebe has been not only, unquestionably, the most foundational and
influential African voice in all of literature written in English but, without exaggeration,
one of the most impactful voices in all of literature. Many attribute this immeasurable
influence of the Father of African Literature to his striking ability to convey ubiquitous
truths across cultural and geographic boundaries. Comparing Things Fall Apart to a
Shakespearean tragedy, Harold Bloom, for instance, describes Achebe’s portrayal of these
global realities as the “universal sorrow” of the novel (Modern Critical Interpretations 2).
Others accredit Achebe with a complete lack of concern with global relatability and a
refusal to whitewash true-to-life depictions of Igbo culture, perhaps what Adichie
resentfully quotes as “African authenticity.”
11
Namely, Diana Akers Rhoads interprets
Things Fall Apart as a novel that juxtaposes Afro- and Eurocentrism in order to
ultimately portray the values of Igbo society as morally superior to colonial modernity.
12
I
disagree with this reading. I understand the key to Achebe’s resonance with global
11
Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. “The Danger of a Single Story.” YouTube, uploaded by TED, 7 Oct. 2009,
www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9lhs241zeg.
12
Rhoads, Diana Akers. "Culture in Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart.” African Studies Review, vol. 36,
no. 2, 1993, pp. 61-72.
48
audiences to be his depictions of reality, unconcerned with moral victory. It is his
portrayals of the humanity and inhumanity of all people that grant Achebe such a vast,
empathetic readership.
Achebe’s representation of twinhship in Things Fall Apart plays a central role in
reflecting this universal moral complexity. Of the criticism surrounding Achebe’s use of
twins as a trope in the novel, most readings seem predominantly concerned with the Igbo
history of neonaticide and the ethical and social implications of that history. For instance,
Abdul Janmohamed’s “Sophisticated Primitivism: The Syncretism of Oral and Literate
Modes in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart” discusses Achebe’s twin killings in exploring the
extent to which Achebe is able to “negate colonialist literature,” such as the “racial
romances” of Joyce Cary, through his depictions of what Janmohamed calls “authentic
‘images’ of Africans” even within his narrativization through the English language (19).
The twin killings, for Janmohamed, then, are merely reflections of the cultural landscape.
For Diana Akers Rhoads, too, the infanticide of Achebe’s twin figures serves as evidence
for Achebe’s representation of “the cultural roots of the Igbos in order to provide self-
confidence,” while also “referenc[ing] them to universal principles which vitiate their
destructive potential” (“Culture,” 61). Rhoads acknowledges that in addition to Achebe’s
presentation of Igbo culture’s wisdom and beauties, “Achebe also presents [Igbo
culture’s] weaknesses which require change and which aid in its destruction” (61). With
this acknowledgment, Rhoads is able to make a claim regarding Achebe’s ultimate goal
of presenting “a common humanity which transcends the European and the African,
which belongs to both but is peculiar to neither” (61-62). It is this presentation of the
common humanity among all people in the novel that, I believe, makes the twin figures
49
powerful not only as a key tool in the protagonists’ transformation but also a pivotal trope
to the narrative as a whole. The twin infanticide’s influence on characterization is,
perhaps, easy to overlook, given the lack of direct interiority with which Achebe
describes the moment’s impact on the characters; Nwoye’s reaction is depicted through
metaphorical, concrete prose rather than abstract, affective language. For instance, in
Nwoye’s struggles to grapple with his distress and sense of injustice regarding the infant
twin killings, Achebe relies on the metaphorical, concrete language of Western religious
hymns. Achebe writes, “The hymn about brothers who sat in darkness and in fear seemed
to answer a vague and persistent question that haunted his young soul—the question of
the twins crying in the bush” (147). Achebe further writes, “He felt a relief within as the
hymn poured into his parched soul. The words of the hymn were like the drops of frozen
rain melting on the dry palate of the panting earth. Nwoye’s callow mind was greatly
puzzled” (147). Within this imagery in his description of Nwoye’s thinking, Achebe
creates a fusion of Africa and the West, using the common African literary theme of
drought in illustrating the mental and emotional impact of the Western, Christian hymn.
Nwoye’s peaceful reaction to the hymn is in itself paradoxical, as the religion that has
brought him this serenity also encourages his mental and emotional state of turbulence
through its encroachment on the community. This turbulence seems to stem less from the
intersection of dissimilar African and Eurocentric worlds and more from the recognition
of their immoral parallels—a smudging of the clear-cut line between good and evil. The
twins, then, are a key symbol in signposting Achebe’s persistent subversion of traditional
categorizations that would position Africans and the missionaries on morally opposite
sides of racial, regional, and cultural binaries.
50
Achebe presents several rejections of conventional racial, regional, and cultural
binaries even beyond the most obvious blurring of those boundaries. The significance
Achebe places on guns, for one, exemplifies such cultural and racial merging. For
instance, Okonkwo’s, and the clan’s, misfortune following Ezeudu’s funeral is caused by
a gun explosion:
Darkness was around the corner, and the burial was near. Guns fired the last salute
and the cannon rent the sky. And then from the center of the delirious fury came a
cry of agony and shouts of horror. It was as if a spell had been cast. All was silent.
In the center of the crowd a boy lay in a pool of blood. It was the dead man's
sixteen -year- old son, who with his brothers and half-brothers had been dancing
the traditional farewell to their father. Okonkwo's gun had exploded and a piece of
iron had pierced the boy's heart. (124)
Here, Achebe’s mixing of the traditional village ritual with the image of a gun—an
inherently colonial symbol due to its Eurasian roots and use as an empirical weapon—
creates a cultural fusion of village customs and coloniality. Achebe’s use of locusts also
reflects cultural mixing. Achebe first describes locusts as a delicacy for the community;
the village waits longingly for the locusts’ coming and celebrates their arrival: “‘Locusts
are descending,’ was joyfully chanted everywhere, and men, women and children left
their work or their play and ran into the open to see the unfamiliar sight. The locusts had
not come for many, many years, and only the old people had seen them before” (55-56).
Upon the missionaries’ invasion of Umuofia, however, locusts become a negative
descriptor for the colonists: “They were locusts, [the Oracle] said, and that first man was
their harbinger sent to explore the terrain. And so they killed him” (139). In this
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description of the colonizers as locusts, Achebe mirrors a Christian, Biblical perspective
of locusts as a plague sent for the purpose of torment. Thus, Achebe exhibits a gradual
mingling of Igbo and Christian religious beliefs, even if such mingling is inadvertent. The
culmination of these instances of cultural blending, in addition to many others, is
Okonkwo’s eventual suicide. At the end of the novel, Achebe writes the following:
In the book which [the District Commissioner] planned to write he would stress
that point. As he walked back to the court he thought about that book. Every day
brought him some new material. The story of this man who had killed a
messenger and hanged himself would make interesting reading. One could almost
write a whole chapter on him. Perhaps not a whole chapter but a reasonable
paragraph, at any rate. There was so much else to include, and one must be firm in
cutting out details. He had already chosen the title of the book, after much
thought: The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger. (208-209)
While this treatment of Okonkwo’s death as entertaining or enlightening reading takes
credit for Okonkwo’s “pacification,” the act of suicide itself demonstrates Okonkwo’s
autonomy in determining the terms of his own death. In this dual claim of ownership over
even Okonkwo’s death, cultural and racial binary divides are, once again, fused together.
Interestingly, in each of these moments of racial and cultural merging, Achebe appears to
be blatantly commenting on the detrimental effect of the forced religious and
governmental transformation of Umuofia, a detriment Katelyn Harlin calls “the
apocalyptic impact of modernity” (“One Foot,” 21). Even with these overt cultural and
racial clashes Achebe illustrates, however, Achebe rejects the image of this conflicting
impact of colonial forces against African traditions as an imperial defeat against the Igbo.
52
Okonkwo’s gun calamity, the native African men’s adoption of Christian references, and
even Okonkwo’s suicide are all presented as either a fateful, involuntary choice or a
choice driven by personal motivations, as opposed to foreign religious or political
imposition. Hence, by negating the notion of colonial victory over “primitive” Africans,
Achebe ironically offers an empowering narrative of resistance to modernity specifically
through the continual collision of both cultures. Achebe’s twin characters, and their
treatment as stereotypical curses upon the community, are a key emblem that reflects this
blurring of boundaries that segregate races and cultures in the novel—a subversion of
firmly separate racial and cultural spaces that is paradoxically revealed through the
presentation of those racial and cultural categories as head-to-head adversaries. Through
this bridging of colonial racial and cultural binaries, Achebe is able to create a rich and
complex narrative that fiercely rejects the imposition of modernity that has led to
Okonkwo’s death while still validating the humanity of all people, despite their cultural
and racial designations. In novels featuring stereotypical twin figures that have come
after Achebe’s, we see this same binary-breaking spirit exhibited through the inclusion of
anti-colonial commentary alongside portrayals of the complexities and humanity in all
people.
The Joys of Motherhood
The widely popular Buchi Emecheta communicates universal truths in her works
through repeated themes of motherhood and women’s liberation. Through these themes,
Emecheta narrativizes the tensions between traditional Igbo culture and European new
ways of living, thus, like Achebe, smudging lines between African tradition and colonial
53
modernity in her novels. The Joys of Motherhood, by far Emecheta’s most well-known
novel, exemplifies this border-crossing nature of her work, even in the question of genre
alone. Teresa Derrickson, in “Class, Culture, and the Colonial Context: The Status of
Women in Buchi Emecheta’s The Joys of Motherhood” discusses the extent to which the
The Joys of Motherhood fills in gaps in the socioeconomic narrative of African women
while also raising questions about that narrative. In this way, Emecheta’s novel itself
traverses the strict divide between ethnographic realism and thought-provoking fiction.
Because Emecheta so often raises such questions about the social and economic freedoms
for African women, feminism is the most obvious and widely used theoretical framing
through which to read the novel, despite Emecheta’s own rejection of the extremism of
feminism, which, for Emecheta, seems to reject some values essential to indigenous
African/Igbo women regarding their womanhood. The extent to which Emecheta sees the
empowering potential in the traditions of African womanhood, such as polygamy and
motherhood, that feminism “with a big f”
13
would view with absolute disdain, makes of
Emecheta a kind of ideological boundary breaker as much as she is a merger of cultural
binaries.
The lack of scholarship spotlighting twinship in The Joys of Motherhood makes
sense, given that all four of Emecheta’s twin characters are relatively minor characters. A
few scholars at least briefly study the twins, coincidentally, in their studies of Emecheta’s
novel as a paradox. For instance, in “The Paradox of Motherhood in Buchi Emecheta’s
The Joys of Motherhood,” K. Nagarathinam discusses the irony in Emecheta’s women
characters’ essential roles within society and their contradictory treatment as subordinate
13
This quote a reference to Emecheta’s consideration of herself as a “feminist with a small ‘f’” (“Feminism
with a Small ‘f’ 175).
54
to men in their roles as women, wives, and, perhaps most of all, mothers. Nagarathinam
alludes to the protagonists’ birth of twin daughters Taiwo and Kehinde and her
subsequent birth of another set of twin daughters, Obiageli and Malchi, in describing the
compacting stressors that give meaning to the novel’s ironic title—a reference to “the
traditional belief that ‘a decent burial’ is the joy of motherhood” (23-24). Abd Al-Sameaa
likewise studies the paradoxes Emecheta presents throughout the novel, particularly with
regard to the aspects of the novel that Al-Semaa argues makes the novel a womanist text.
Within this discussion of the ironies of the novel, Al-Sameaa mentions the twins’ roles as
“the interplay of race, gendered, and socioeconomic repressive forces” that add to the
protagonist’s already immense list of struggles (“Struggle for Self-Identity,” 44). While
these scholars, among others, reference Emecheta’s twins in their examinations of the
narrative’s reflection of paradoxical realities, such as obvious ironies like the title itself,
not many have recognized the twin characters as reflective of those paradoxes, as well as
paradoxes in and of themselves.
In the novel, Emecheta, like Achebe, portrays the collision of colonial and
traditional cultures, along with the confrontation of Yoruba and Igbo cultures. Throughout
the novel, Emecheta tells the often-painful story of a woman, Nnu Ego, who must grapple
with her role as a mother and woman in a setting that is ever-fluctuating due to poverty
and British invasion. As Nnu Ego’s financial and marital struggles intensify, she gives
birth to twin daughters, Taiwo and Kehinde. While these twin characters are strikingly
similar visually, they are behaviorally, stereotypically, polar opposites. Describing these
differences, Emecheta writes, “They were identical in appearance, but not in character,
the one called Kehinde, ‘the second to arrive,’ was much deeper than Taiwo,’ ‘she who
55
tasted the world first’” (203). While the sisters’ duality in conjunction with their
contrasting personalities sufficiently supports a reading of the twin characters as a
reflection of the novel’s backdrop of cultural dissonance between the Igbo and the
invasion by British troops, they more directly reflect clashing Igbo and Yoruba cultures in
their marriage choices, Taiwo choosing traditional, arranged marriage to an Igbo man,
and Kehinde choosing to run away to marry a Yoruba man. In their stereotypically
disparate personalities within their singularity as a twinned pair, Taiwo and Kehinde
together illuminate a number of bridges Emecheta builds between seemingly incongruent
constructions—the merging of cultures through colonial invasion and crossed Nigerian
cultural boundaries, the merging of spiritual and earthly realms through the spiritual
beliefs surrounding both Taiwo and Kehinde’s twinship
14
and Nnu Ego’s relationship
with her chi, and the merging of regional spaces into which the characters are forced
throughout the novel.
Emecheta’s presentation of cultural merges throughout the novel is easily visible
in her portrayals of the invasion of British troops. For instance, Emecheta describes the
religious impact of this colonial control, as well as the social and economic pressures to
at least pretend to conform to the colonizers’ religion. Emecheta depicts the extent to
which Christianity impacts Nnu Ego’s, and her family’s, opportunities for prosperity,
writing of Nnu Ego’s husband, Nnaife, and his sense of obligation in acquiescing to the
Christian faith: “If I do not marry you in a church they will remove our names from the
church register and Madam here will not like it. I may even lose my job” (50).
14
In Yoruba mythology, Kehinde is considered the elder twin, albeit the second to be born. Taiwo is sent
into the world by Kehinde in order to test the earth for safety. This is the mythology from which the twins’
names derive, Taiwo meaning “first to taste the world” and Kehinde meaning “second-born.”
56
Interestingly, through this repeated presentation of aggressive cultural conflicts,
Emecheta also communicates a message that disrupts single narratives about Africa as a
place of helpless socioeconomic devastation, as Nnu Ego and her family are forced to
leave their home and relocate elsewhere due to the British occupation. In this way,
Emecheta paints a clear image of Nnu Ego’s economic despair and near-starvation as a
direct cause of European intrusion rather than the inherent economic failure of Africans.
Thus, Emecheta subverts colonial notions of rigorous divides that separate modernity and
African tradition—divides that associate the British with social and economic progress
and Nigeria with primitivism. Emecheta also demonstrates penetrable regional
boundaries throughout the novel. These permeable borders are both physical, as Nnu Ego
and her family are continually displaced and forced to move through several spaces to
call “home,” and spiritual, as Nnu Ego faces continual misfortune prompted by her chi,
believed to be the spirit of a ritually slaughtered slave woman. Despite the bleakness with
which these binary ruptures are explicitly depicted, Emecheta’s narrative is not one of
utter hopelessness. In Nnu Ego’s persistent crossing of physical and spiritual borders,
Emecheta communicates a sense of constant drifting that conveys the idea that life’s
devastations, amidst its joys, are ever-fluctuating and never an inevitable, predestined
fate. Nnu Ego’s father especially exhibits these ebbs and flows in Nnu Ego’s home
environment and her struggles, as well as the momentary nature of those struggles, as he
tells her, “Don’t worry, daughter. If you find life unbearable, you can always come here
to live” (33). These ironic cultural and regional bridges that Emecheta presents
throughout the novel are, again, reflected through her stereotypical depictions of Taiwo
and Kehinde as a pair of inevitably matched-up opposites. And in her depictions of the
57
second set of twins, Obiageli and Malchi, as additional hardships who quickly,
predictably, fade into the background of the novel, treating the siblings as stereotypically
disposable to the narrative, Emecheta reflects the notion of Nnu Ego’s suffering as
temporary and easily discarded. Thus, in these caricatured treatments of twinship that
reenact the historic treatment of twins as a trope that is presented as either a pair of
behavioral opposites or an easily exposable duo, Emecheta emblematically shatters
cultural and regional binary divides in the novel even as she presents them as
contradictory. In so doing, Emecheta, like Achebe, broadcasts a challenging of the single
narrative of Africa as a place of mere misery and simplicity, a powerful refutation of
inaccurate visions of Africa reflected, in part, through the clever employment of twins
who are depicted, paradoxically, in simple, typecast ways.
A Twin World
The employment of stereotypical imaginaries for twinship is prominent
throughout young adult fiction in Africa, too. Mosibudi Mangena’s short novel A Twin
World also uses the twinship trope in ways that reflect subversions of traditional
conceptions of cultural and regional distinctness. As a noncanonical children’s novel,
critical scholarship on the novel is quite scarce; however, one of the only academic texts
that discusses the novel with any true importance—Elwyn Jenkins’ National Character in
South African English Children’s Literature—situates Mangena’s novel in connection
with other books that, together, subvert traditional notions of cultural or racial purity.
Even the very first words of Jenkins’ work make evident this cultural and racial
commentary:
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In a continent where national borders were arbitrarily created by colonial powers
and colonists in the nineteenth century, in a country in which literary histories that
seek a grand narrative of national emergence have been discredited, in the twenty-
first century, when globalization is making the concept of the nation state
increasingly problematic, the use of the term ‘national character’ in a new book
needs explanation. (xi)
Jenkins goes on to explain his notion of a “national character,” which is an essential
literary representation of “what it was or is like to live in South Africa and be South
African” (xii). Mangena’s novel fits well within Jenkins’ questioning of the colonial
confines of South African literature and South African identities, given that the main
themes of the novel also revolve around regional and cultural confines, and, more
specifically, the shattering of those borderlines through an acceptance of hybridized
regional and cultural environments, a bridging of religious and other cultural schisms in
the novel. While Jenkins mentions Mangena’s twin protagonists, it is crucial to note that
the twins are more than the protagonists of the narrative; they are symbols of the novel’s
major themes, once again, Mangena placing them in stereotypical roles as opposites.
Interestingly, however, Mangena simultaneously treats the twins as conventionally
identical physically and, in some ways, behaviorally. Mangena narrativizes the story of
identical South African twin sisters who become engaged to two very different suitors.
Mangena relies on some stereotypical depictions of twins as uncannily similar in drawing
connections between twinship and cultural overlapping that happens throughout the
novel. Mangena introduces the twins, saying, “The identical Mpho and Khomosto were
so beautiful, one could be forgiven for believing they were designed to decorate the world
59
rather than to perform the mundane functions humanity is condemned to” (11). In this
way, the sisters are, in some senses, treated with the spectacularization that Dillon and
Farmer discuss,
15
as mere matching aesthetic decorations as opposed to the complex main
characters of the narrative. But this spectacularization as purely identical twins is a
necessary reinforcement of traditional, stereotypical views of twinship in order to reflect
the similarities between apparently dissimilar cultures. Through Mangena’s Rastafari
character—characterized most prominently as a staunch pan-African, Africa-first political
advocate—Mangena offers a critical view of Africa’s struggle to reject the cultural
influence of its oppressor:
Only the African has one foot in Africa, and the other in Europe and oceans of
water beneath him. And struggling to keep his balance. That’s why Africans are so
easy to oppress, even by remote control. A people without cultural integrity can
have no soul, character, or dignity. They live in a twin world of blurred lines and
fuzzy images. (95)
Within this apparent use of a specifically Rastafari insistence upon Africa’s cultural
individuation and complete separation from Europe, the use of the twins trope to reflect
the inevitable overlapping of African and European cultures becomes clear. Despite the
twins’ different tastes in men—one who advocates for Rastafari cultural imperialism and
the other who is South African and politically influenced by Eurocentric Christianity—
Mangena portrays the twins as an inextricably bonded pair, who are nearly
indistinguishable. In so doing, Mangena creates of the twins a reflection of separate but
15
As previously referenced, both Dillon and Farmer spotlight observations of the common, constant
creation of objectified twinned spectacles and twins’ performances of similitude or stark difference within
that spectacularization.
60
similar African and European cultural spheres—two separate cultural bodies, whose
appearances certainly favor and who cannot be disconnected from one another. This
reflection is made all the more apparent in that, by the end of the novel, the sisters jointly
marry their overtly dissimilar suitors, who by the end of the novel, concede that their
Christian and Rastafari cultural backgrounds are not as far removed from each other as
they had presumed. The novel’s final scene especially reflects Mangena’s use of the
twins’ trope as a paradox that reflects these cultural overlaps. After their joint wedding,
the twin sisters stand in front of side-by-side bedroom doors, suggestively inviting their
new husbands to consummate their marriages. This highly sexualizing final image is the
culmination of Mangena’s objectification of the twins as spectacles who, again, behave as
ornaments—or, in this case, flashing arrow signs, pointing their men to long-awaited,
erotic pleasure—more than substantive characters. Ironically, however, the
hypersexualization of the twins, along with Mangena’s other stereotypical images of the
sisters as simultaneously opposite and identical, makes of the sisters emblematic echoes
of Mangena’s main message—the paradoxical sameness that Mangena illustrates among
supposedly detached South African and Rasta cultures and regions. As such, Mangena
continues the trend of employing stereotypical visions of twinship, refusing strict
compartmentalization rooted in colonialism, and reflecting, instead, an amalgamation of
racial, regional, and cultural differences.
Half of a Yellow Sun
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie also uses single stories of twinship, ultimately
producing this same racial, regional, and cultural bridging. Adichie is one of the most
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well-known living African writers, next only, perhaps, to Wole Soyinka or Ngũgĩ wa
Thiong'o. One reason for Adichie’s exponential success has been her communication of
relevant global realities through the communication of African truths and experiences
habitually believed, from Western and European vantages, to be unrelatable. In Half of a
Yellow Sun, Adichie shatters illusions of clearly dividable and extractable cultures in
Nigeria in this story, which narrativizes the lives of a group of people in the years before
and during the Biafra Civil War of 1967-1970. Adichie’s specific use of her twin
characters in echoing the unraveling and rebuilding of Nigeria during this period is
apparent, as the twin sisters—Olanna and Kainene—experience estrangement and
reunification in the course of the novel. Scholarship surrounding the novel steadily
identifies Adichie’s use of twinship as an echoing symbol of the social shifts and political
unrest painted as the backcloth of the novel. Many read Adichie’s presentation of
twinship through a feminist lens. Jane Bryce, for example, studies Adichie’s twins within
an examination of new feminine identities for African women. In “Half and Half
Children: Third-Generation Women Writers and the New Nigerian Novel,” Bryce
recognizes the use of twin characters in Half of a Yellow Sun, and other third-generation
Nigerian novels, as a narrative device that “has emerged in these writers as a means of
exploring the repressed feminine in relation to a socially conditioned version of
femininity, inflected by issues of exile, hybridity and metissage” (50). Similarly, in
“Educated Women in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun,” Charlotte
Gernandt reads the twins as dual protagonists within a narrative that communicates the
culture of women’s education in Nigeria. Using Adichie’s essay “A Young Female is
Unsuccessful without a Man in Nigeria” as an intellectual, feminist launchpad for her
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readings of Half of a Yellow Sun, Gernandt explains how the novel demonstrates how
“[W]omen in Nigeria need to navigate through many cultural circumstances which are
very different from western societies, and this is not just in rural areas but in modern
cities” (14). Other critics view Adichie’s twins through a focus on class. In “‘She is
Waiting: Political Allegory and the Specter of Secession in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s
Half of a Yellow Sun,” Meredith Coffey writes of the Adichie’s use of Kainene and
Olanna as “two divergent images of the middle class” that ultimately contribute to the
novel’s overall revised vision of middle-class identities (99). Others study Adichie’s twin
characters within a look at several novels, some of whom also contain twin characters.
Elleke Boehmer, for instance, explores several texts that demonstrate the incredible
influence of Achebe. Within this discussion, in “Achebe and His Influence in Some
Contemporary African Writing,” Boehmer argues that Half of a Yellow Sun, undoubtedly
influenced by Achebe, completely centers the stereotypical duality and separation of the
twin sisters. Madhu Krishnan, in “Biafra and the Aesthetics of Closure in the Third
Generation Nigerian Novel,” also explores Kainene’s and Olanna’s duality and
separation, reading their relationship as one that ends abruptly, without catharsis,
symbolic of an unsure political and social outlook on Nigeria. For Krishnan, “by refusing
the narrative compulsion of closure and tidy endings, these narratives and their
representation of individuals and conflicts highlight the importance of continued
negotiation and interrogation necessary in the postcolonial condition” (194). My analyses
of the sisters’ continual fracturing and healing bond align with these readings of Kainene
and Olanna as a trope that ricochets the volume with which Adichie conveys the violent
smudging of cultural and ethnic lines established through colonialism.
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Throughout the novel, the sisters’ relationship shifts from seemingly completely
unruffled to rocky at best. At the start of the novel, the sisters are emotionally close.
Interestingly, however, within this description of the twins’ closeness, Adichie avoids a
caricature of the sisters as physically or emotionally identical. Adichie writes, from
Richard’s perspective, that Olanna is a beautiful woman, “[taking] after their mother,
although hers was a more approachable beauty with the softer face and smiling
graciousness and the fleshy, curvy body that filled out her black dress” (60). Adichie
describes Kainene as far less feminine, “thinner next to Olanna, almost androgynous, her
tight maxi outlining the boyishness of her hips” (60). With these descriptions, Adichie
firmly establishes the twins’ use as a narrative device; Adichie adheres to the convention
of placing the twins side-by-side, as a twinned pair, in order to highlight their differences,
stereotypically presenting the twins as opposites. Adichie adds to this notion of Kainene
and Olanna as physically and behaviorally opposite spectacles in Olanna’s descriptions of
the social expectations associated with the twins’ presence at their father’s party: “‘Have
you ever been to the market in Balogun?’” she asked. ‘They display slabs of meat on
tables, and you are supposed to grope and feel and then decide which you want. My sister
and I are meat. We are here so that suitable bachelors will make the kill” (59). With this
vivid imagery, Adichie illustrates an image of the sisters as spectacles on display, waiting
to be scrupulously contrasted and commodified. After Olanna’s affair with Kainene’s
lover, Olanna and Kainene rarely speak at all. Upon the suggestion that Olanna call
Kainene, Adichie writes, “[Olanna] wanted to change the subject. She always wanted to
change the subject when Kainene came up” (343). When Olanna and Kainene do speak,
their calls are not at all anticipated:
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Olanna sighed and slowly recited Kainene’s number.
Kainene sounded sleepy when she picked up the phone. “Olanna? Did something
happen?”
Olanna felt a rush of melancholy; her twin sister thought something had to have
happened for her to call. (130)
While rejecting half-truths about twins’ extrasensory perceptions of one another, Adichie
portrays the sisters as emotionally distant towards each other, even if alike in their
melancholy for the intimate bond they once shared. In later returning to their emotional
closeness, the sisters embrace after a long separation: “Ejima m, ” she said, hugging
Olanna. Their embrace was close, their bodies pressed warmly against each other” (434).
This warm embrace comes only a few moments after the two reunite in a completely
different fashion: “‘Kainene!’ Olanna extended her arms slightly, uncertainly, and
Kainene moved forward; their embrace was brief, their bodies barely touching before
Kainene stepped back.” (431). Through these joint depictions of the sisters’ quickly
changing sense of physical and emotional comfort with one another, Adichie exemplifies
the twins’ constant oscillation from psychologically attached to emotionally distant.
However, even in Olanna and Kainene’s worst of moments, Adichie presents the sisters
as, ultimately, emotionally inseparable. Upon Kainene’s phone confrontation with Olanna
regarding Olanna’s betrayal of her marriage, the call ends unresolved, as Kainene hangs
up on Olanna. Adichie writes, “Olanna put down the phone and felt a sharp crackling
inside her. She knew her twin well, knew how tightly Kainene held on to hurt” (319).
While this moment certainly demonstrates Olanna’s immense guilt, it also reflects an
empathy deeper than guilt, one that demonstrates the twins’ bond, which surpasses any
65
anger or “unforgiveable” offenses between them. The “crackling” Olanna feels within
herself is not a moment of grief over their irreparably damaged sister bond but a genuine
feeling of sorrow, described as a physical sensation, for the long-lasting pain of her sister.
In this sense, Adichie portrays the sisters as a paradox—opposites who are always,
ultimately, emotionally inseparable, irrespective of the many differences and physical
borders that appear to divide them. Still, within the consistent fragmentation of the
sisters’ relationship, Adichie, perhaps most like Achebe, captures the complexities of the
“twinship” between the politically divided Nigeria and Biafra. Perhaps unlike the other
novels analyzed in this chapter, however, alongside Adichie’s occasional use of her twin
sisters as a stereotypical trope, Adichie also grants her twins outlying individualities that
defy single stories of twins as inseparable. Through this complex characterization,
Kainene and Olanna reflect the thorny “twinship” between Nigeria and Biafra, one that,
in reality, cannot be classified within singular notions that paint them as either total
adversaries nor completely emotionally attached entities.
With Kainene’s and Olanna’s ultimate indissoluble relationship, Adichie creates
an artful symbolization of duality that rejects ideas of clear divides between the Yoruba,
Igbo, and Hausa that catalyzed the civil war, even amidst fractured Nigerian unity due to
British colonization and declaration of Nigerian independence. The extent to which the
sisters’ friendship is mended towards the end symbolizes an optimistic, paradoxical
message about nationhood and independence that both leaves room for the uncertain
future of Nigeria and its ability to mend its wounds and distinctly challenges cultural
binaries created by the regional fragmenting of major Nigerian groups. While so many
moments throughout the novel exemplify the violence of this regional and cultural
66
fragmentation, Richard’s airport experience upon his arrival in Kano particularly
showcases this viciousness with which the cultural and ethnic lines are drawn and
demanded. After meeting a young customs officer in training named Nnaemeka, the
airport is overrun by soldiers waving guns and shouting “Ina nyamiri! Where are the Igbo
people? Who is Igbo here? Where are the infidels?” (192). Focalized through Richard,
Adichie narrates the heinous, graphic nature of the attack:
Nnaemeka knelt down. Richard saw fear etched so deeply onto his face that it
collapsed his cheeks and transfigured him into a mask that looked nothing like
him. He would not say Allahu Akbar because his accent would give him away.
Richard willed him to say the words, anyway, to try; he willed something,
anything, to happen in the stifling silence and as if in answer to his thoughts, the
rifle went off and Nnaemeka’s chest blew open, a splattering red mass, and
Richard dropped the note in his hand. (192)
While Adichie illustrates the absolute callousness of this cultural and ethnic clashing, the
splattering of Nnaemeka’s chest reflecting the mass bloodshed during the war, it is crucial
to recognize the ways Adichie weaves such scenes throughout the narrative, interspersing
them between moments of everyday joys and pain—parties, weddings, infidelity, and
friendly gossip. In this way, not only does Adichie illustrate the violence of strict ethnic
and cultural categorization. In this adherence to the genre of war novels, Adichie achieves
a level of deep sadness in her story precisely through her rejection of the novel’s strict
categorization as a book solely about war; it is a book primarily about war but also about
people and their incongruent realities—Olanna’s and Odenigbo’s progressing sense of
familial closeness despite their history of infidelity and an illegitimate child, Ugwu’s
67
development into a great writer of Biafra despite his educational and social status,
Olanna’s and Kainene’s lasting twin bond despite their differences and despite Kainene’s
disappearance at the end of the novel. In all of these paradoxical endings for these
characters, Adichie’s novel is a hopeful, diasporic revisioning of the future of Nigeria.
Adichie’s presentation of the potential for unexpected relations among different
characters and to their community is a subversive visualization of Nigeria that challenges
not only the ethnic and regional divisions of the land but the colonial origins of these
divisions. Olanna’s and Kainene’s paradoxical twinship as a pair of opposites, and
Olanna’s persistence in searching for Kainene at the end of the novel, points to the
simultaneous, seemingly incongruent realities that, regardless of their cultural, regional,
or ethnic differences, the people of Nigeria are, like Olanna and Kainene, inextricably
connected in the “postcolonial” nation and that, like the twin sisters, Nigeria and Biafra
are inevitably impacted and torn apart by the history of colonialism.
Ghana Must Go
Taiye Selasi’s Ghana Must Go, like Half of a Yellow Sun, reflects a postcolonial
vision of Africa, one that encompasses cultural and racial blending that isn’t as overtly
reflected in the earlier works of writers like Achebe. Also similar to Adichie, Selasi uses
twins as a trope for communicating third-generation African cultural and regional
overlapping, even as Adichie’s novel is set in the 1960s, and Selasi’s is set in the present.
Selasi is even further akin to Adichie in that scholarship on Ghana Must Go is most often
read through a lens constructed of Selasi’s own theoretical and philosophical
perspectives. Most scholars read Ghana Must Go with a focus on Selasi’s presentation of
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Afropolitanism, a concept Selasi made popular in her 2005 essay “Bye-Bye, Babar: The
Rise of The Afropolitan.” Emerging from cosmopolitanism, and currently inhabiting a
major subspace of cosmopolitan studies, Afropolitanism encompasses international
metropolises within Africa and cultures that reach beyond national boundaries and
throughout the diaspora. For Achille Mbembe, the term signifies “the presence of the
elsewhere and the here”—a reference to the intermingling and meshing of black and
nonblack people throughout Africa (“Pan-African Legacies,” 28). For Taiye Selasi, on the
other hand, the term signifies the individuals throughout the diaspora with experiences
and cultures that are both African and central to areas outside of Africa. Whether the term
is applied to the interweaving of cultures within Africa or outside of Africa, the central
concept of Afropolitanism is the same; it is an African innovation that encourages an
almost paradoxical release of complete Afrocentrism and an embrace of the global in
order for African people and cultures to become more globally accepted and represented.
Of the scholars who have written about Ghana Must Go through an Afropolitan lens,
Chielozona Eze’s “Rethinking African Culture and Identity” is a stand-out. In aligning
with my readings of the novel, Eze writes that Ghana Must Go, along with other texts
considered to be Afropolitan, contain narratives that “show an intermeshing of
relationships across ethnic, religious, and racial lines, thus blurring cheap dichotomous
categorizations of persons” (235). Also lining up with my analysis, Susanne Gehrmann,
in “Cosmopolitanism with African Roots: Afropolitanism Ambivalent Mobilities”
considers Ghana Must Go to be a narrative about mobility, a story of a typical
Afropolitan, migrant family continually forcibly displaced. Amidst this reading,
Gehrmann also offers a subtle critique of other Afropolitan readings of the novel, as some
69
argue that the family exhibits a progressive sense of mobility that is freely motivated by
their own personal agency—an argument that Gehrmann seems to believe is far too
optimistic with regard to the family’s ability to resist social and political forces. Like
Gehrmann, Amatoritsero Ede is somewhat critical of notions of Afropolitanism, as, for
Ede, “[n]ew African identities . . . ought not to be simply described and analysed as the
result of an ahistorical and triumphant globalization or internalized on the experiential
level . . .” (98). Within this critique, Ede questions Selasi’s artistic choices for the novel:
“It might well be worth wondering why Selasi’s novel, Ghana Must Go (2013), opens
with a glossary of pronunciations and definitions, an item that would usually be reserved
for the end matter” (94). Ede answers this question with a critical supposition: “Perhaps,
that textual detail bespeaks an overt authorial anxiety to be accessible to the metropolitan
public when material that should make up part of end-matter, if at all necessary, is
strategically placed in the work’s prelims” (94). And in “Part-Time Africans,” Grace A.
Musila critiques Afropolitanism as a concept while still reading the novel through an
Afropolitan lens, explaining that “in its pairing of African and cosmopolitan,
[Afropolitanism] is haunted by anxieties about the ‘African’ on its own not being deemed
cosmopolitan enough” (110). Musila even compares Africans’ self-identities as
Afropolitan to racial passing—“a rejection of the tag ‘African,’ while articulating protest
against narrow pigeonholing of African cultural production” (109). Musila’s critique of
Afropolitanism alongside her reading of the four siblings at the heart of Ghana Must Go
as Afropolitan also fits alongside my own reading of the novel as one that demonstrates
the ways in which cultures and regions are not quite so easily outlined by solid,
impenetrable borders. Among these readings of Selasi’s novel, I have found virtually no
70
one who dedicates considerable focus to the two main characters who I believe to be,
perhaps, the most central figures with regard to Selasi’s message of these cultural and
regional intersections—Selasi’s twin sibling characters Taiwo and Kehinde.
Afropolitanism is a helpful lens through which to view Selasi’s use of the twin
characters as a trope for communicating cross-continental and -cultural overlapping.
Ghana Must Go tells the story of a family who, after years apart, is forced back together
after the family patriarch’s death. As much as Selasi describes the shifting and complex
dynamics of a distant family, Selasi also grapples with themes of immigration and
returning to African roots. For example, throughout the novel, Taiwo’s struggles to
belong in her physical surroundings are interwoven with her struggles concerning her
racial and cultural identity. Taiwo’s racial difference in relation to her physical
environment is particularly noted in discussions about her place within her predominantly
white college community. In one scene, Taiwo reveals that she has gotten dreadlocks to
gain more of a sense of belonging within her college space:
[W]hat kind of black girl grows locks? Black girls who go to predominantly
white colleges, that’s who. Dreadlocks are black white-girl hair. A Black Power
solution to the Bluest Eye problem: the desire to have long, swinging, ponytail
hair. The braids take too long after a while, the extensions. But you still need a
hairstyle for running in the rain. Forget the secret benefit from affirmative action;
this is the white woman privilege. Wet hair. Not to give a shit about rain on your
blowout. I’m serious. (138)
Taiwo’s discussion of black and white women’s hair differences here demonstrates
Taiwo’s perspective as both an observer of such differences and a subjective participant
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in the “Black Power solution” she identifies. Selasi’s portrayal of Taiwo’s detachment
from her college environment and reflection on her racial identity creates an opportunity
for an Afropolitan reading, since, for Selasi, the Afropolitan must form an identity along
at least three dimensions: national, racial, cultural” (“Bye-Bye Babar” par. 9).
Alternatively stated, Taiwo’s ability to mentally distance herself enough from her
environment to critique it demonstrates an ability to detach from any one immutable
definition of “home” that does not allow for an identification with her African roots. In
this way, Taiwo treats her markers of identity, particularly related to her race, culture, and
sense of home, as permeable constructions from which she can remove herself or to
which she can attach herself. Like Taiwo, Kehinde is detached from his physical
surroundings. For Kehinde, however, this detachment is less related to his racial identity
and more pertaining to his identity as an artist. Through Sadie’s focalization, Selasi
describes Kehinde’s artistic world view:
There is Kehinde’s pure talent, the gift of the image, that quiet assurance with
which he looks out as if all of the world were overlaid with some pattern
indescribably beautiful and meaningful, a grid, and if only you could see it as
clearly as he could, then you too would take to blank easel with brush just as
simply as one watches movies, the news, without commitment, simply seeing and
understanding the seen. (214-215)
In this description, Selasi portrays the world—and Kehinde’s physical space—as
a canvas, and Kehinde as the artist, who does not exist inside the art but, rather, carefully
observes his artistic subject “without commitment.” Selasi also demonstrates this mental
distance Kehinde places between the world and both himself and Taiwo. In this sense, for
72
both Taiwo and Kehinde, the emotional separation placed between their twinship reflects
their, and their family members’, regional and cultural displacement. Just as Taiwo and
Kehinde both remain unavoidably connected as twinned characters, even despite attempts
to emotionally disconnect from each other, the characters of the novel remain
ineliminably attached to Ghana even despite their conceptualizations of their own
identities as mostly detached from Africa. Therefore, through her twin characters, Selasi
illustrates her characters’ sense of their race, regionality, and culture as structures of
identity that the characters adopt and remove rather fluidly and yet, paradoxically, are
fixed as constructions to which the characters seem inescapably connected.
Through the siblings, Selasi conveys the inextricable linkages between Selasi’s
characters and Africa, and this specific use of the twins trope allows Selasi to reflect on
the simultaneous psychological, emotional, regional, racial, and cultural connections and
disconnects that occurs as a result of politically forced regional migration. The novel’s
title itself references the Nigerian President’s executive order forcing Ghanaians out of
Nigeria in the 1980s. The novel, therefore, starting with its very name, is an allusion to
(African) migration. This migration is prevalent throughout the novel, as Selasi’s
characters live in and travel to and from many countries, including the United States,
Ghana, the United Kingdom, and Nigeria. Selasi’s twin sibling characters Taiwo and
Kehinde reflect this regional and cultural merging through their physical proximity
throughout the novel:
The twins, nine years old, fast asleep in the lounge in those ugly blue chairs with
the yellow foam stuffing, arranged as they always were, locked into place like
some funny wooden Japanese logic-game puzzle: Taiwo’s head on Kehinde’s
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shoulder and Kehinde’s cheek on Taiwo’s head, a girl and a boy with the same
amber eyes throwing sparks from their otherwise gentle young faces. (11-12)
This closeness is repeated again after the siblings have grown up and grown estranged:
“They fly into Ghana, Taiwo’s head on Kehinde’s shoulder, Kehinde’s head on Taiwo’s
head, before they wake and detach” (193). Selasi’s depictions of the twins’ physical
closeness specifically during sleep and their subsequent choice to physically disengage
upon awakening, points to a conscious struggle for physical and emotional distance,
which they are subconsciously unable to achieve, implying a level of automatic, innate
physical closeness. In this way, Selasi’s presentation of Taiwo and Kehinde’s twinship
mirrors the coexistence of cultures and regionalities present for these characters. Just as
Taiwo and Kehinde have been physically and culturally distanced by continents but still
seem to possess an unconscious, inevitable connection, Selasi’s novel strikes at the heart
of what it means to be a person with several intersecting cultures and places to associate
with “home,” and the ultimate conclusion is that multiplicity within one’s definition of
“home” is possible. Thus, despite Selasi’s reflections of a forced migration, and,
therefore, of a reproduction of strict colonial insistence upon “pure” and inflexible lines
designating nationality, region, and race, through her paradoxically distant and inevitably,
intimately close twins, Selasi echoes the impossibility of notions of strictly binary
identities that call for distancing and stringent racial, regional, and cultural separation.
These readings of some of Africa’s most famous literary twin figures reveal the
subversion of supposedly strict racial, cultural, and regional boundaries. In reflecting the
African cosmologies from which these representations are, either consciously or
74
unconsciously, very likely derived, African writers have chosen to embrace stereotypes of
twinship that are often dangerous to twins themselves, perpetuating twins’
marginalization or outright ostracization from “normal”/singleton society on a global
level. Paradoxically, however, this adherence within the boundaries of twin
generalizations reveals the subversion of racial, cultural, and regional boundaries that are
most often conceived as impenetrable. Here, I submit that understanding this paradoxical
nature of twinship’s performance in literature can help us to better discern not only other
paradoxes that the trope of twinship might bring to light in these texts—such as, perhaps,
gendered, sexual, or political constructions that were not the focus of this chapter—but
also the paradoxical nature of the power of subversion in African diaspora texts
altogether. What these readings of stereotypical twinship and unconventional binary
breakages reveal, above all else, is the essential use of paradoxes in the achievement of
an intellectual colonial resistance for African diaspora texts, including literature, films,
television, visual texts, etc. Perhaps, this nature of subversion that relies heavily on the
use of irony and contradictions makes twinship, then, a desirable tool for African writers,
and black writers and creators across the globe. And, perhaps, these paradoxes and
subversive conceptual border crossings uniquely equip creators of African diaspora art to
provide an epistemological traversability to their work that makes them powerful
resistance texts. I contend that dissecting this anti-colonial intellect and identifying a
reliance on paradoxes as a crucial element within that subversion is a potential key to
understanding how to create future, material subversions of the colonial binaries that the
texts I have analyzed in this chapter continually reject. In the chapters to follow, I will
reflect on the implications of these possibilities through an exploration of twinship’s
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function particularly in contemporary African American literature and African and
African American film and television, and I will explore the possibility of the shared
cosmological and mythical connections across all of these genres and media. This
“twinning” of African and African American texts, as I will further explain in these
chapters, is also a powerful form of border crossing, bridging literary and cultural
traditions across geographic and colonial divides.
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CHAPTER TWO
Powerful Pairs: Tales of Crossed Racial, Regional, and Cultural Lines in African
American Twin Literature
In the first chapter of this dissertation, I analyzed portrayals of twinship in a
variety of twentieth- and twenty-first-century African novels, prioritizing analyses of
Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, Buchi Emecheta’s The Joys of Motherhood,
Mosibudi Mangena’s A Twin World, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun,
and Taiye Selasi’s Ghana Must Go. Through my examinations of these novels, I sought to
demonstrate the ways contemporary African twin narratives echo the African mythologies
from which they were derived, or, at least, by which they were undoubtedly greatly
influenced. Within these mythological comparisons, I examined the Ibeji of Yoruba
religion and culture, narratives of twins’ spiritual breakthroughs between spirit and
human worlds. I also described myths surrounding twins in Ontisha culture, promoting
the notions of twins as an abomination (nso ani) against the earth deity Ala/Ani, along
with myths among the Niger Hause-speaking commune of Dogondoutchi, which
communicate beliefs in twins’ witch-like behaviors, such as invisible flight and the
psychic ability to harm one another. Additionally, I studied narratives from the Kedjom
people of the Cameroon Grassfields, who likewise portray twins as possessing psychic
powers, such as the ability to morph themselves or to disappear (fentah). I also described
cultures and societies in which twins are highly revered, such as the those among the
Dogon of Mali and in the Bamenda Grassland. I also described artistry dedicated to
twins, such as the Luba and their images of male-female oracles and the personal shrines
for spiritual doubles oma and iyri out of the Isoko region of Bayelsa State Nigeria, along
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with reflections on balance and human connection in art from the Bamana, Fon, Hausa,
and Senufo. Through my reviews of these cultural histories of twinship representations
alongside contemporary African portrayals of twinship in literature, I found similarities in
twins’ stereotypical depictions across time—as either subordinate species who must be
eradicated, superhumans or spiritual beings who must be praised, or supernatural beings
with psychic, sometimes evil, powers. While these stereotypes are usually more obscured
in modern literature, they are nevertheless present, within the significance of Nneka’s and
Amaka’s names in Things Fall Apart, for instance.
16
This second chapter builds upon the
work of the first chapter by asserting that the narrative overlaps between African
mythological and contemporary narratives are present also in African American literature,
extending the idea of the use of stereotypical depictions of twinship for portraying
regional, cultural, and racial hybridity to African American authors as well.
In her debut novel Where the Line Bleeds (2008), Jesmyn Ward tells the story of
twin brothers, Christophe and Joshua, as they enter a new working world of adulthood
and are thrust down diverging career paths, one landing a job at a dockyard and the other
driven into an illicit circle of drug dealing. Towards the end of the novel, after the story’s
most climactic moment—the stabbing of Christohpe in the midst of a brawl over drug
debts—Ward portrays the brothers’ interminable connection despite their summer of
separation:
Christophe grabbed his brother’s wrist, held it, felt the blood beating beneath his
fingertips, sat so still he heard his own blood pounding in his ears. Joshua’s pulse
16
In Igbo, the name Nneka means “Mother is Supreme,” and the name Amaka means “Good and
beautiful”—both traditional celebratory descriptions of mothers of twins.
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matched his own. Christophe’s arm began to ache, but he sat that way, holding his
brother, and Joshua remained still. . . .Christophe closed his eyes, but did not
remove his hand from his brother. He shrugged. His brother, their wounds, Ma-
mee dimming like a bulb, his parents’ places unknown orbiting them like distant
moons: it was enough. (234)
While fictional illustrations of twins often fail to capture exactly the connections that
real-life twins so often share—connections that extend beyond the biologically or
psychologically explainable—Ward’s descriptions of her twin characters in this scene
depict the brothers as psychically attached, despite the plethora of circumstances that
could drive the two apart. Within this reunification, Ward presents the twins as spiritually
one, not only as identical twins but as a single body, the brothers’ pulses beating in
syncopation, Joshua’s wounds mirroring Christophe’s, becoming “their wounds.” What is
more, this representation of the twins’ intimate bond in this cathartic moment reveals an
essential truth about their relationship—that, while both brothers experience many
changes throughout their summer “apart,” from their sleep patterns and diets to their
physical appearances, they never truly experience the emotional or psychic separation
that characterizes the progression of their relationship for many readers. Rather than a
reunification—the start of a renewed connection between the brothers, the scene is a
denouement—a concluding picture of their shatterproof bond that, throughout the
progression of the novel, has consistently pulled the siblings to their natural conjoint state
with magnet-like force. Ward alludes to the twins’ bond as similar to scientific, covalent
attraction in her portrait of the brothers as planets (perhaps even a singular planet)
suspended in space, their familial anxieties cast faraway in their gravitational orbit.
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In Ward’s depiction of her twins’ enigmatic, seemingly psychic connection despite
miles of emotional and even physical distance, Where the Line Bleeds reflects the
experiences of many real-life twins. We know that instances of exceptional psychological
connectedness in twins, commonly called “twin telepathy,” is an actual scientific
phenomenon. Since Francis Galton’s initial, and problematic, scientific interest in twins
in the early twentieth century, which led him to report significant “similarity in the
association of [twins’] ideas,” there have been a number of scientific studies which seem
to suggest a kind of biological and early experiential extrasensory perception among twin
pairs (The History of Twins 372).
17
And, what is more, while nearly all of these studies
attribute twins’ concurrence in thinking to similarities in their upbringings and early life
experiences, there is also a plethora of often-cruel studies, conducted primarily in the
mid-1900s, that focus on personality and thought similarities even after twins’ forced
separation at birth.
18
These fictional and actual accounts of twins’ metaphysical connectedness despite
great physical and sociological separation are not completely dissimilar from the
discernable interrelation between African literature and African American literature—a
literary “twinship” that has certainly been vastly studied. For example, in her widely
circulated essay “What is Africa to Me?: Reading the African Cultural Base of (African)
American Literary History,” literary and ethnic studies scholar Gay Wilentz reviews three
17
One such study that is particularly notable is the “Ganzfeld Study with Identical Twins,” conducted by
Duane, Behrendt, and Bohm, who reported their findings at The Parapsychological Association 49th Annual
Convention.
18
Arguably the most famous example of these cruel studies is Peter B. Neubauer’s experiments as the
director of the Child Development Center at the Jewish Board of Guardians. In this study through Louise
Wise Services, Neubauer separated identical infant twins and placed them in different families selected
according to socioeconomic status, religion, education, parents’ ages, siblings, etc.
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foundational works that epitomize common readings of Africa and black America as
reticular. Wilentz first reviews John Cullen Gruesser’s Black on Black: Twentieth-Century
African American Writing about Africa (2000), which studies the impacts of
Ethiopianism on nineteenth- and twentieth-century African American literature. Within
this investigation, Gruesser identifies the main conventions of Africanist discourse, which
he believes posit “binary oppositions that contrast Africa and the West, [projecting]
images onto the perceived blank slate of Africa” (65). Gruesser further accuses Africanist
writing of frequently depicting Africans as “lagging behind Westerners in terms of moral,
intellectual, and/or material development” (65) and of portraying Africa as “a dream or a
nightmare and often a dream that becomes a nightmare (65). Ironically, despite
Gruesser’s vehement argument against this binarism common among comparatist African
and African American literary critics, Gruesser’s central subject of analysis inevitably
falls into a similar dichotomous trap. Within Gruesser’s study of the African roots of
black-national, Southern, and general American cultures that have greatly impacted
African American literature, he creates, in essence, cause-and-effect polarity between the
ancestral influence of Africa and its contemporary American result, an influencer-
influenced binary that observes the undeniable interconnectedness of African and African
American literature through a consideration of Africa secondarily, as supplemental to its
American successor. Additionally, Gruesser writes solely about African American
literature written about Africa, further separating notions of America and Africa as
oppositional, writers versus the subjects of writing.
The second work Wilentz discusses is Keith Cartwright’s Reading Africa into
American Literature: Epics, Fables, and Gothic Tales (2001). As a Southern scholar with
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personal history in Senegal, Cartwright uses his unique perspective as an inspirational
launching point for this study of American literary conventions that mimic Islamic and
West African cultures, which he calls Senegambia/Mande. Similar to Gruesser,
Cartwright observes the ancestral connectedness between Africa and America, writing,
“What I hope to trace here is something of the historical routes and semiotic systems by
which Africa may be recognized as a foundational source of the American mainstream”
(1). Cartwright finds these connections undeniable and deeply interwoven into the fabric
of America, reminding readers of the intimately personal connections that even the
‘Founding Fathers’ had to Africans and early African Americans. Cartwright writes, “. .
.Thomas Jefferson’s first memory was of being carried on a pillow by a black servant”
and explains that such accounts reveal the significant role of African and African-born
children in creating a leading “voice to our nation’s yearnings for freedom” (2). Unlike
Gruesser, Cartwright explores evidence of these African roots not just in African
American literature but in black and white American literature, particularly literature out
of the South. However, Cartwright’s title focus on “reading Africa into American
literature” poses a similar inevitable contradiction as that of Gruesser—the treatment of
Africa as a supplemental set of cultures to be read into American literature, as opposed to
a set of cultures and people to be exposed as an influence that has always been present in
American literature. In this way, Cartwright also reinforces divides between America and
Africa, as America is posited as a land of rich writing worthy of being the center of
critical attention, and Africa is positioned as merely an ingredient within America’s
literary recipe. While Cartwright’s overall goal is to demonstrate Africa’s influential
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connections to America, this analysis of influence, perhaps unavoidably, portrays Africa
as the subject of writing rather than a continent of writers itself.
Wilentz’s third work of interest, The Gullah People and Their African Heritage
(1999) by William S. Pollitzer falls into similar characterizations of Africa as a mere
constituent of American society, this analysis centering specifically the Gullah people of
the Lowcountry region of Georgia and South Carolina. Indeed, the very first words of the
book’s forward, written by David Moltke-Hansen, demonstrate this characterization:
“The Gullah people . . . are among the most studied populations in the United States.
They continue to attract attention for several reasons: They show more African influences
in their self-expression, behavior, and beliefs than any other long-establishing larger
population group” (xiii). While Pollitzer pays a great deal of attention to the parallels
between Africa and the Gullah people, his focus on such areas of Gullah culture as music,
dance, and basketry, as well as Pollitzer’s attention to the ways Gullah traditions “contrast
tellingly with the modern world” introduces the image of Gullah people as a group who
completely counters the rest of contemporary America; by extension, then, Africa is
portrayed as a place of antiquated traditions that oppose American modernity.
Ironically, what each of Wilentz’s chosen texts for analysis demonstrates is the
critical tendency to read Africa and America as separate, and often even antithetical, even
within works that overtly and vehemently argue the opposite. As these works also
demonstrate, our literary conversations surrounding Africa and America are extensions of
this notion of disconnectedness. However, despite this assumed division between African
and American literature, close analysis reveals their deep-rooted inseparability in spite of
spatial, temporal, and cultural distance. This mere acknowledgement of their indivisibility
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is, of course, not in itself a novel observation. Immediately, one is likely to be reminded
of Toni Morrison’s observations of the real African influence and imagined “Africanist
presence” in American fiction,
19
Alice Walker’s multiple engagements with Africa in her
essays and in her novels like The Color Purple and Possessing the Secret of Joy, or Ngũgĩ
wa Thiong’o’s numerous calls for decolonizing the mind.
20
These are just some
prominent examples amidst a plethora of writers who acknowledge the obvious
intertwining of Africa and America. Furthermore, my above readings of the subtle notions
of division between Africa and America in Wilentz’s chosen works for review are not
sweeping assessments that completely override their blatant readings of African and
American entanglement.
An aim of this current chapter is echoing these acknowledgments of the
intertwining of Africa and America, while also echoing these writers’ understandings that
such acknowledgements hold the potential for inadvertently implying the comparability
of Africa and America regarding their size and cultural or linguistic complexities. Rather,
my desire is to replicate Kwame Anthony Appiah’s remarks that “[t]o accept that Africa
can be . . . a usable identity is not to forget that all [Africans] belong to multifarious
communities with their local customs” and that the referencing of Africa broadly “is not
to dream of a single African state and to forget the complexly different trajectories of the
continent’s so many languages and cultures” (In My Father’s House 180). Instead, my
reading of African literature and African American literature as existing within a
19
Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Vintage Books, 1993.
20
While Ngũgĩ’s rejection of Western writing techniques and even use of the English language among
African writers would seem to indicate his insistence upon a total literary separation between Africa and the
West, his concern regarding the “alienation of the African from his own society through the acceptance of
Western culture and technology,” of course, points to the tremendous Western influence in African literature
that Ngũgĩ has strived to combat (Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o's Visions,” 86).
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“twinship” uses the notion of twins not in order to assert their identicalness but, rather, to
propose a figurative understanding of their connection as one that exists beyond scientific
or sociological explanation, as a kinship that is more cosmological than biological. My
choice in this chapter to study African American works that feature twin characters is a
logical extension of this study of twinship, a study of African diaspora literature’s twin-
like connection through the study of texts that, in themselves, reflect the connections that
twins share. What these texts demonstrate is a widely-held, cross-continental subscription
to stereotypical beliefs about twins—for instance, that they are either identical in every
aspect or total opposites. This subscription to stereotypical categories for twins in African
American literature is paradoxical in that, as in African literature, the adherence to
categorical thinking about twinship seems to perpetually occur alongside the shattering of
boundaries for other constructions that might also be traditionally conceived according to
fixed categories, such as race, region and culture. Understanding this trope of twinship
and its literary function as a paradox offers an important glimpse into how African
diaspora texts naturally rely on paradoxes as a key element within their subversion of
those constructs, like race, region, and culture, that are conventionally conceived with
strict binaries.
In the previous chapter, I examined some of the most famous contemporary
examples of twin characters in African literature, studying the ways these twin figures
reveal the subversion of supposedly strict racial, regional, and cultural boundaries even
despite the stereotypical ways their twinship is so often portrayed. In that chapter, I
argued that studying this paradox that is the rejection of what is commonly assumed
regarding strict binaries and borders through the use of portrayals of twinship that
85
conform to common assumptions and expectations is helpful in understanding the
paradoxical and uniquely flexible nature of African diaspora literature—literature that
often relies on stereotypes in pointing to conceptual border crossings specifically
regarding race, region, and culture. My aim for this current chapter is to incorporate
African American literature into this consideration of African diaspora literature, as it is
my perspective that when viewed together, African and African American representations
of twinship offer a model exemplification of the cosmological and spiritual
interconnectedness of African diaspora literature. This side-by-side comparison and
contrast of African and African American literary twin representations reveals the
ultimate “twinship” of African and African American cultures in the ways they are clearly
commonly regarded, ironically, as simultaneously distinct and indistinguishable.
This notion of African diaspora literature’s potential to subvert traditional
understandings of racial, and cultural constructions as fixed is not only well-studied;
21
it
could be understood as the central, inherent goal of most contemporary African diaspora
literature written in English. From Africans’ letters and petitions to colonial leaders, early
slave narratives, and pro-abolition essays to contemporary fiction with persistent themes
of social turbulence and tradition versus colonial modernity, African diaspora writing has
continuously staked out its identity as resistance writing. The concept of African diaspora
literature not only resisting traditional understandings of racial, regional, and cultural
constructions but also reconceptualizing such constructions to include hybrid identities
finds resonance with postcolonial theories related to national, regional, and cultural
21
A critical focus on African diaspora literature as rejecting firm racial and cultural constructions can be
seen, perhaps most notably, in Keith Clark’s “A Distaff Dream Deferred? Ann Petry and the Art of
Subversion.”
86
border crossing. For instance, as I have iterated throughout this project, Homi Bhabha
conceives of a “Third Space” in which racial and cultural identities are reevaluated,
creating colonial anxiety through the demonstration of hybridity, defining hybridity as a
bewildering racial and cultural mixing that represents “a difference ‘within’ a subject that
inhabits the rim of an ‘in-between’ reality” (The Location of Culture 13). Bhabha further
defines the “Third Space” in which such mixing occurs as “a place of hybridity,
figuratively speaking, where the construction of a political object that is new, neither the
one nor the other, properly alienates our political action . . .” (25).
Throughout this dissertation, I have also employed Gloria Anzaldúa’s earlier
discussion of cultural and racial hybridity as political disruption that focuses on Mexican-
American identities, poetically employing the sea as a third-space representation of the
futility of man-made regional borders. Anzaldúa’s use of “Yemaya” as the personification
of the destruction of physical borders points to her similar understandings of the
subversion of internal borders related to personal identities, such as national, racial,
cultural, and gender identities. This emphasis on the power of individuals to, by their
very nature, muddle inherently colonial binaries extends to the national and cultural
identities of people who straddle racial, national, and ethnic lines. Terming these
individuals “mestizas,” Anzaldúa uses her experience as a Mexican American woman as
real-world, anecdotal evidence for the colonial disruptions she examines. Of herself and
her fellow inhabitants of the borderlands, Anzaldúa writes, “Stubborn, persevering,
impenetrable as stone, yet possessing a malleability that renders us unbreakable, we, the
mestizas and mestizos, will remain” (64). Here, Anzaldúa portrays people with hybrid
identities as the empowered opposites of the rigid colonial boundaries they reject.
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I have also alluded to Benedict Anderson’s understandings of language, which
offer another conception of hybridity as anti-colonial, reading languages as inherently
hybridized and rejecting man-made cultural and national designations. Languages,
Anderson argues, are often used as tools for promoting such imperial illusions, and
Anderson confutes these sovereign images as facades. As vernaculars, languages are, to
Anderson, hybrids in themselves, blends of standardized, colloquial, and outside forms.
As linguistic hybrids, then, languages are innately resistant to notions of purity that are
essential to colonial thinking.
While I have repeatedly acknowledged the valid critiques of these early theories
of hybridity,
22
Bhabha, Anzaldua, and Anderson, are helpful in supporting my
understanding of hybridity as immanently combatting colonial outlooks regarding purity
and hierarchal structures of racial and social order. My examination of African diaspora
literature in this chapter contributes to these theoretical perspectives by offering a new
subject for exemplifying hybridity’s anti-colonial essence. In the literary analyses that
follow, I hope to demonstrate the ways that African diaspora literature—in this case
African American literature in particular—perhaps uniquely, possesses a spirit that is
markedly bound up in representations of hybridity. At the heart of each novel I analyze in
this chapter is the communication of binary breakages that reject notions of purity,
particularly as they relate, in these texts, to race, culture, and region. I contend that these
books, all featuring twin characters, exemplify not just that subversion of colonial notions
of racial, regional, and cultural purity happens in African diaspora literature but how that
subversion happens in African diaspora literature. The presence of twins in these texts
22
In my recognition and support of these critiques, I primarily reference the work of Jonathan Friedman,
Shalini Puri, and Pnina Werbner.
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especially makes the process of this subversion visible, as I believe that this hybridity-
centered colonial destabilization occurs in these books through an adherence to rigid
stereotypes—in this case, traditional caricatures of twinship. I am interested in
investigating the paradox that is this use of such rigid stereotypes even while, and,
perhaps, for the purpose of, sending overarching messages that overtly defy the black-
and-white inflexibility of colonial thought. The central argument of this chapter is that
studying these texts’ employment of stereotypes associated with twins, as well as similar
characterizations of twins in African literature and cultures, reveals that African American
literature and African literature are intimately entangled and that this inextricable
connection reveals a possibility of black, anti-colonial resistance through both African
American and African texts alike—a possibility directly at odds with the notion of Africa
and America as irreconcilably opposite. In these texts, the specific trope of twinship
works as a microcosm, revealing not just the deep cosmological roots that bridge these
two continental genres; it reveals how these genres work in similar ways to subvert
binary ways of thinking about race, region, and culture, paradoxically, through a reliance
on stereotypical binaries. In this way, I argue, African and African American literatures
are “twinned” themselves as two genres often placed together in critical discourses but
more often for the purposes of contrast rather than comparison.
Significant to this argument are the overt stereotypes that twins in contemporary
literature tend to uphold—portrayals as either eerily similar, strikingly dissimilar,
supernatural, subnatural, or spiritually connected. However, leaning into these stereotypes
which would normally harm them, I argue, actually allows these twin characters to serve
as a compelling example of the subversive resistance present—maybe even inherent—in
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black art, a kind of reclamation that ironically welcomes conventional, even harmful,
tropes for the sake of challenging even larger monochromatic ways of thinking. For this
current chapter, my interest is in expanding this argument to also consider how African
American literature featuring twin characters similarly demonstrates a paradoxical
adherence to damaging twin depictions that often place them in stereotypical, binary roles
within literary messages that overwhelmingly reject stereotypical, binary thinking. This
exploration will further reveal that twinship representations are not geographically
restricted and that the global fixation on twinship we see throughout the world has been
at least heavily influenced by African cosmologies, if not directly formed out of them.
For this examination, I will be primarily analyzing William Melvin Kelley’s dem (1967),
Toni Morrison’s Paradise (1998), A Mercy (2008), and God Help the Child (2015),
Jesmyn Ward’s Where the Line Bleeds (2008), and Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half
(2020). My reasons for including this range of texts within the analysis that follows are
manifold. Firstly, the breadth of this list of novels demonstrates that literary trends in
representations of both twinship and hybrid identities have remained fairly consistent for
over half a century. Secondly, analyzing this large amount of literature allows for
exploration of the different ways twinship is used as a paradoxical trope in African
American literature and, therefore, the different ways twins are stereotyped in African
American literature (e.g., as completely phenotypically and behaviorally similar, as polar
opposites in both appearance and behavior, as possessing supernatural abilities, etc.).
Lastly, and, perhaps, most importantly, the width of this analytical scope allows for a
much more extensive view of African diaspora literature’s propensity for centering
hybridity through adherence to harmful stereotypes. Indeed, even in these novels’
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depictions of characters who are not twins, the characters are often depicted in
caricatured ways or in conventionalized, cliché situations. This use of stereotypes which
would usually be harmful for the sake of resisting other harmful characterizations is a
phenomenon that is worth exploring in the many different ways it occurs throughout
these novels.
Of the few scholars who have noted similarities with regard to African and
African American fascinations with twinship, there are an extreme few who discuss
literary twins with any notable recognition, and I have found virtually no one who has
discussed these fixations with regard to literature while dedicating equal amounts of
attention to African literature and African American literature in a full-length work. Still,
some of the few who have compared twins in African and African American literature or
cultures in any considerable amount, or at least verged on this comparison, deserve brief
recognition here, and many of these works are described in much more detail elsewhere
in this dissertation. For instance, while not mentioning African American literature
specifically, in “Diaspora, Gender, and Identities: Twinning in Three Diasporic Novels,”
Brenda Cooper discusses twin characters in diaspora literature written by writers with
Nigerian parents, writing on Diana Evans’s 26a (2005), Esi Edugyan’s The Second Life of
Samuel Tyne (2004), and Helen Oyeyemi’s The Icarus Girl (2005). In The Spectacle of
Twins in American Literature and Popular Culture, Karen Dillon also briefly mentions
twinship in Nigerian literature within a much larger study of twins representations in
African American Literature. And in “Half and Half Children: Third-Generation Women
Writers and the New Nigerian Novel,” Jane Bryce also discusses Nigerian writers’ use of
twinship as a narrative device, using Henry Louis Gates’ The Signifying Monkey: African
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American Literary Criticism as a theoretical framing for understanding twins as
reflections of repressed femininity. Focusing less on literature and more on artwork,
Phillip M. Peek additionally compares African and African American cultural productions
of art featuring twins, explaining that the study of African American art is crucial to
studies of African art because of their clearly shared origins. Peek writes, “If something
has survived the horrors of the Middle Passage and of slavery, it must be significant”
(75). For Peek, this “something” is any of the aspects of twinship artwork that are clearly
rooted in African mythology. Peek also iterates this sentiment in his book Double
Trouble, Twice Blessed: Twins in African and Diaspora Cultures. Similarly, “Temne
Twins (Tà-bàri) Should Share Everything: Do You Mean Everything?” also draws
attention to artwork centering twinship, describing the appearances, uses, and beliefs
surrounding artful twin figures throughout Africa. Also analyzing artwork that features
twins, Lousie Siddons observes connections between contemporary African American
artwork and African traditions in “African Past or American Present? The Visual of James
VanDerZee’s ‘Identical Twins.’” Others devote less attention to textual representations of
twinship and more attention to the beliefs surrounding those representations. For
example, in “Dere Were No Place in Heaven for Him, an ‘he Were Not Desired in Hell’:
Igbo Cultural Beliefs in African American Folk Expressions,” Jennifer Hildenbrand
briefly mentions beliefs surrounding twinship in this exploration of Igbo cultural roots in
African American folklore. In this chapter, I hope to expand upon these scholars’ work by
offering an in-depth analysis of the trope of twinship in contemporary African American
literature, making evident its connections to African literary fixations on twinship and
leaving room for other chapters within the larger work of this dissertation to explore the
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possibility of the shared cosmological roots of those connections. Cooper, Peek, Dillon,
and others have certainly made clear African diaspora literature’s and artwork’s repeated
reliance on twinship; however, in tandem, these works raise the question of what purpose
twins ultimately hold in their role as a trope in African diaspora texts. Why do twins seem
to be such a reachable tool for conveying the specifically racial, social, and political
themes so commonly conveyed in African and African American texts? This chapter will
add to these scholars’ understandings a new perception of twinship’s role in African
diaspora literature. Twins are one of several tropes employed in African diaspora texts for
the purpose of stereotyping. Alongside this adherence to unmalleable, simplified ideas of
twins, however, African diaspora literature dependably resists the rigidity of colonial
conceptions of social constructions such as race, culture, and region, among others. The
recurrent use of twins within this consistent anti-colonial messaging specifically through
illustrations of our hybrid realties is an important indication that twinship may be a key to
unlocking an essential truth about African diaspora literature; similar to The Signifying
Monkey, African diaspora literature empowers in reverse, through an embrace of rigid
binaries for the ultimate purpose of gaining power as a breaker of strict colonial binaries.
dem
When considering African American literature’s illumination of real-world
hybridity and its fixation on twins as a trope in communicating this rejection of colonial
notions of purity, William Melvin Kelley’s dem (1967) is an obvious choice for analysis,
particularly given the Civil Rights Movement into which the novel was birthed. Similar
to other Civil Rights Movement literature—Hansberry’s archetypal depiction of Walter
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Lee as an overly ambitious, emasculated black man in A Raisin in the Sun or Baldwin’s
use of drugs as a clichéd symbol in “Sonny’s Blues,” for examples— Kelley’s use of
twins in dem intriguingly relies on a “strictly opposites in every way” single narrative for
twins within his ultimate communication of the racial and sociocultural complexities that
completely quash single narratives. Most secondary criticism surrounding Kelley’s
writing focuses on Kelley’s 1962 novel A Different Drummer, a novel that, like dem, is
African diaspora literature focalized through the perspectives of white characters.
23
Relatively few have dedicated scholarship to Kelley’s dem, and very few have discussed
dem in the twenty-first century. During dem’s popularity in the 1970s, most critics
pointed to the crossed racial borders in the novel, reading these moments as ultimately
demonstrating such phenomena as white aggression and American violence. Jill Weyant’s
“The Kelley Saga: Violence in America” is of particular notice among this criticism, as
Weyant reads all of Kelley’s novels as conveying the ultimate “incompleteness” of
whiteness revealed through an extreme level of apathy towards the struggles experienced
by black people. Weyant writes of the world Kelley depicts through his novels: “The
white world is counterpointed by the gentleness, the joie de vivre, the fraternity of the
black world, a throbbing, vital, underground placed in opposition to the harsh, confused
neurotic superstructure of the whites” (211). Like Weyant, I believe Kelley’s illustration
of this obsessive compulsion to abide by conventional racial and cultural structures
essential to whiteness is a crucial contradiction to the racial and cultural flexibility with
which Kelley presents blackness in dem. In the novel, about a middle-class advertising
23
Examples of scholarship that emphasizes regional and racial binary breakages in Kelley’s A Different
Drummer are Trudier Harris’s “William Melvin Kelley’s Real Lives, Invisible South” and W. Lawrence
Hogue’s “Disrupting the White/Black Binary in William Melvin Kelley’s A Different Drummer.”
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executive whose wife gives birth to twins, Kelley’s white protagonist Mitchell infiltrates
a black social setting, passing as a light-skinned black man, who claims to be passing for
white in his career and life outside of his home life. Kelley writes, “This my cousin,
Mitchell, from Canada. From a small, snowy-ass town where the underground railway
left his granddaddy’s butt. Had to keep the blood moving. . . . Mitchell did not know if
he liked being . . . colored” (156). Supplementarily, this scene, among several others
throughout the novel, demonstrates the bridging of class divides, as Mitchell infiltrates
the personal and group spaces of lower-class black characters.
Kelley additionally demonstrates the performativity of race through his
protagonist’s internalized thoughts. After Mitchell’s discovery of his association with the
black child his wife births, Kelley writes, “The remaining five nurses ringed Mitchell and
the Cubans as if to pronounce with straitjacket and hypodermic needles loaded with
tranquilizer” (109). Kelley’s references to the tranquilizer here focalized through
Mitchell’s perspective just moments after learning of his relation to a black child—even
given that the child is not biologically his—animalizes Mitchell, demonstrating a
performed internalization of animal-like stereotypes associated with blackness. This
dehumanization associated with blackness, along with Kelley’s depiction of white
characters as taking on characteristics of blackness, is revealed again in the description of
Goodwin, Mitchell’s fellow white colleague, and his combat experience. In a coded
conversation about suspicious black men who may be lurking in the public park,
Goodwin describes his unparalleled ability to ward off predators by killing them with his
bare hands. Goodwin explains, “You blacken your face and move as quiet as a butterfly. .
. .Cover the scream, break the windpipe. You want any dessert?” (12). Kelley’s
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description of blackface in this scene draws a direct connection between Goodwin’s
violence and his association of that violence with blackness, his physical embodiment of
blackness listed as a key step in the process of manifesting that violence. In this way, too,
Kelley points to the ability for white characters to take on not only the physical
characteristics of other races but the stereotypes they associate with other races. This
flexibility and performativity with which Kelley depicts racial categorization within the
novel is further illuminated in Mitchell’s fictive racial projections onto other characters.
For instance, as he makes love to his wife, Tam, Mitchell imagines her as an Asian
woman: “They went on with it. But Mitchell had to think about the girl who had
unslanted her eyes for him when he was in Asia” (18). Not only does this moment cast
fictional Asian racial characteristics onto Tam; it also ascribes qualities of whiteness onto
the Asian woman in Mitchell’s fantasy, interestingly ascribing a racist hypersexualization
of Asian women onto Tam in the same moment as Kelley empowers the Asian woman of
Mitchell’s past-turned-imagination to perform her own version of whiteness. In this
treatment of racial categories as permeable throughout the novel, Kelley pushes back
against racial binaries, an act of resistance that, again, seems innate within the texts I
analyze throughout this dissertation.
These moments, exhibiting the flexibility with which Kelley depicts racial
categorization throughout the novel, inform my reading of Mitchell’s violence against
Opal, the family’s black maid. Throughout the novel, Kelley’s third-person narration
focalized through Mitchell gradually grows more and more sexual in nature. Describing
Mitchell’s view of Opal performing everyday housework, Kelley writes, “Drying her
hands, she turned from the sink and smiled at him. She was wearing a pink half-slip
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under her nylon dress. A brown strip of stomach separated her white bra and the pink
half-slip. . . . She bent down and the dress stretched over her buttocks and thighs” (46).
Closely following this physical description, Mitchell, seemingly uncontrollably, attacks
Opal, finding her submission to his authority as the head of his white household insulting:
“B]efore he was fully aware of what he was doing, he had pushed her to the floor,
wrestled the brown handbag from her, dumped its contents on the kitchen table, and was
searching amid hairpins, coins, lipsticks, and scraps of paper for the things he was certain
now she had stolen from him” (48). While this moment is outwardly presented as an act
of aggression stemming from Mitchell’s racist suspicions that Opal is subtly insulting
him, the scene’s proximity to Mitchell’s objectification of Opal makes this moment of
racist violence feel particularly sexual in nature. And, while the violence of sexual assault
is typically focused on power rather than sex, the perversion of this assault creates yet
another blurring of racial lines as a forced intimate collision of black and white bodies,
which contains subtle, if not obvious, sexual undertones. In all of these demonstrations of
racial merging throughout the novel, Kelley demonstrates the ambiguity that is formed
out of the racial hybridization of both physical spaces and individual characters
throughout the novel—an ambiguity that presents race as a flexible construction that can
be manipulated to one’s advantage, subverting notions of racial purity held by opponents
of the Civil Rights Movement out of which the novel emerged. The nature of dem itself,
as an African American novel about conventional concerns and experiences of black
people told through the perspective of white people, especially highlights this racial
ambiguity. In “A View of William Melvin Kelley’s dem,” in fact, Houston A. Baker Jr.
even considers Kelley’s novel a “raceless” novel, identifying the novel’s spirit of racial
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ambiguity, even while overlooking Kelley’s overt commentary on race’s social and
personal construction throughout the novel.
Interestingly, out of the few scholars who acknowledge this racial commentary, no
one, from my observation, has seriously examined Kelley’s use of twins as a narrative
trope—a trope that I believe serves as the central, culminating symbol of the racial
hybridity towards which the entire novel builds. Kelley signals the interracial twins’
significance to the meaning of the novel upon their very arrival, in what is essentially a
copycat game with the reader, inviting readers to imitate the objectifying gazes of the
characters who swarm around the twins after their birth. Kelley writes, “Mitchell noticed
a group of nurses gathered before a large plate-glass window” and “The nurse who
lectured was white and the faces of the other white nurses seemed troubled. The Black
girls, most of them standing on the outside of the group, were smiling” (105). In Kelley’s
invitation to gawk at the twin characters in this moment, the novel reflects and
encourages the stereotypical treatment of twins as objects to be spectacularized, similar,
albeit not expressly or obviously related, to dehumanizing reactions to traditional Igbo or
Ontisha mythologies describing the unnatural, subhuman nature of twinship.
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Kelley
further mirrors these traditional narratives in Mitchell’s perceptions of the babies as
monstrous. Kelley writes, “All these long months Mitchell had imagined one baby,
sexless, faceless even, coiled, waiting—tube, arms, and legs. Now he tried to picture two
babies. But the four hands, four legs, and two heads would not separate. Mitchell’s mind
created a monster” (101). The simultaneity of Kelly’s depictions of the twins as both
24
The Igbo histories to which I am referring specifically regard instances of twin infanticide, which are
explained more thoroughly in the introduction and first chapter of this project.
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completely opposite in racial and sexual makeup and completely similar, nearly
indistinguishable, in their atrociousness reflects the chaos and confusion that stems from
racial hybridity’s abolishment of clear-cut racial binaries. These perceptions of the twins
as monsters extend to Tam, the mother of the twins. Her doctor’s references to
heteropaternal superfecundation
25
castigate Tam morally, also reverberating historic and
current African traditions, this time particular to the social outcasting of twin maternity,
such as the communal shunning of twin mothers in Antambohoaka and Efik tribes, also
often associating twins with the mother’s alleged sexual promiscuity. While Kelley rarely
makes direct references to Africa in the novel, these parallels in the narrative treatment of
twinship, which may, admittedly, be merely coincidental, are certainly worth mentioning.
In this reading of these overlaps between African traditions and the treatment of twinship
in Kelley’s novel, single narratives about twins regarding their existence as dehumanized
spectacles demonstrate the possibility that such stereotypical representations stem from a
common source. Intriguingly, however, through these stereotypical representations,
Kelley’s twins serve as the pinnacle symbol of an unsettling of binary thinking that
ultimately breaks those stereotypes by positing black-and-white single narratives as
inconsistent with a gray reality revealed through the presentation of racial hybridity. This
paradoxical illumination of hybrid realities through the depiction of twins as categorical
and typecast is common among every twinship representation analyzed in this chapter,
perhaps revealing an essential commonality among African diaspora literature and its
process of resistance through its gravitation towards depictions that would ordinarily be
25
Heterepaternal superfecundation occurs through the process whereby “two ova are fertilized within the
same meanstrual cycle, or superfetation, in which the ova are fertilized during different menstrual cycles,”
(“Indisputable Double Paternity,” 1159). Multiple paternities for twins occurs when this process takes place
as the mother has intercourse with two separate individuals.
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harmful for the sake of the subversion of colonial harm via rigid categorization of
identities. Through the commonalities in Kelley’s use of stereotypes for twins, not only
does dem, along with the other novels I analyze in this chapter, reflect a rejection of strict
designations for race, region, and culture, potentially evoking colonial anxiety
surrounding racial, regional, and cultural hybridity; Kelley also reveals a bridging of an
often unconsciously assumed divide between African and African American texts. This, I
contend, is a powerful act of colonial resistance.
Toni Morrison’s Twin Novels
William Melvin Kelley is not the only author to have utilized the scientific
phenomenon of twins with separate black and white biological paternity as a trope for
tackling strict racial categorization, among other categorizations, vital to the fundamental
tenets of white superiority. Toni Morrison also relies on superfecundation in her
introduction of the binary rejections in her novel God Help the Child (2015), the story of
a dark-skinned woman who becomes successful in life despite her mother’s inability to
treat her with kindness. In introducing the story’s main protagonist, Bride, Morrison
explains how Bride was born dark-skinned, much to the dismay of her light-skinned
mother. In the voice of Bride’s mother, Morrison writes, “I hate to say it, but from the
very beginning in the maternity ward the baby, Lula Ann, embarrassed me. Her birth skin
was pale like all babies’, even African ones, but it changed fast. I thought I was going
crazy when she turned blue-black right before my eyes” (5). Lula Ann (or Bride, as she
later names herself) is taught to call her mother “Sweetness”—Sweetness’s attempt to
emotionally and familially distance herself and her daughter. In expressing her shock and
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shame in Bride’s appearance, Sweetness says, “Recently I heard about a couple in
Germany, white as snow, who had a dark-skinned baby nobody could explain. Twins, I
believe—one white, one colored. But I don’t know if it’s true. All I know is that for me,
nursing her was like having a pickaninny sucking my teat. I went to bottle-feeding soon
as I got home” (5). While Morrison references these twins only once in the novel, this
racially hybridized twin pair is a crucial figure in Morrison’s introduction of the
paradoxes present throughout the novel. Morrison’s decision to follow her reference to
the twins directly with a racial slur demonstrates her use of the twins as a trope to convey
a repulsiveness associated with twinship, particularly twinship marked as stereotypically
abhorrent. In this adherence to a single narrative of twins as abominable polar opposites
of one another, however, the twins ironically reflect Morrison’s communication of several
binary subversions throughout the novel, specifically as they relate to race and class.
Nearly every character in God Help the Child is characterized with complex, incongruous
dichotomies. Bride is conveyed as detestable racially and yet alluring and elegant
socially; she is both a “blue-black” woman, associated with the lower class and a largely
successful cosmetics executive. Sweetness loves her daughter, evidenced by statements
like, “At first I couldn’t see past all that black to know who she was and just plain love
her. But I do. I really do. I think she understands now. I think so” (43), and, yet, she treats
Bride with disdain, even describing her brief attempts to kill her: “I know I went crazy
for a minute because once—just for a few seconds—I held a blanket over her face and
pressed” (5). Bride’s coworker Brooklyn is both her admiring colleague and her
competitive foe, this contradiction exemplified in Brooklyn’s description of Bride as a
“[b]eautiful dumb bitch” (139). Bride’s boyfriend Booker is a devoted, loving man; yet,
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he is introduced as an ex-boyfriend who left Bride months ago seemingly without a trace.
In each of these contradictory behavioral and personality chasms, among several others
Morrison presents, Morrison’s characters represent a variegated reality that rejects
narratives of one-dimensionality, reflecting the novel’s ultimate communication of the
inability for categorizations such as race or class to completely define individuals. At the
start of the novel, Sweetness describes her light-skinned parents’ racial passing in order to
advance throughout society: “[B]ecause of my mother’s skin color, she wasn’t stopped
from trying on hats in the department stores or using their ladies’ room. And my father
could try on shoes in the front part of the shoestore, not in a back room. Neither one
would let themselves drink from a ‘colored only’ fountain even if they were dying of
thirst” (4). In complete contrast to this demonstration of racial performance within her
grandparents’ social trickery, Bride fully embraces the darkness of her skin, wearing
white dresses to accentuate her blackness and to attract others’ gazes. In this way, while
the concealment of passing as white might have allowed Bride’s grandparents to remain
under society’s racist radar, Morrison presents Bride as the truly powerful character, not
because she similarly avoids discrimination but because she laughs in the face of that
discrimination and colorism. While Morrison’s description of racial passing could be
viewed as a representation of racial mixing, demonstrating the flexibility and
permeability of racial categories, Bride’s reliance on her position within the black racial
category, her invitation for outsiders to view her with fascination, is what allows Bride to
achieve success in her career. Bride’s use of her especially dark skin color to advance
socially demonstrates this method of what I am calling “reverse empowerment”—the
strategy of submitting to and even accentuating characteristics and stereotypes that would
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normally hurt a person for the sake of gaining power, particularly though the resistance of
strict categorical conceptions related to one’s identity. Morrison’s use of twinship is the
initial indication of this empowerment tactic. Morrison’s use of the trope of twins in
conjunction with descriptions of a racial appearance so loathsome it inspired a mother’s
momentary desires to smother her own daughter creates an association between twinship
and not only shame or rejection but even death, perhaps similar to the historic social
abandonment, and even killing, of twins among the Ibibio, Annang, and Efik people.
While this reading of reflections of African twinship into Morrison’s writing could
appear, at first glance, contrived, it is not the only moment in the novel that may be read
as a clear reflection of African cultural twin representations. Morrison also makes both
overt and subtle references to Yoruba twin mythologies in Booker’s loss of his twin
brother at birth and his regard for his older brother Adam as a surrogate for his dead twin.
Morrison writes of Booker’s emotional closeness to Adam:
Adam was the brother he worshiped, two years older and sweet as cane. A
flawless replacement for the brother he’d curled up with in the womb. A brother,
he was told, who didn’t take a single living breath. Booker was three when they
let him know he was a twin to the one who did not survive birth, but somehow
he’d always known it—felt the warm void walking by his side or waiting on the
porch steps while he played in the yard. A presence that shared the quilt under
which Booker slept. As he grew older the shape of the void faded, transferred
itself into a kind of inner companion, one whose reactions and instincts he trusted.
When he started first grade and walked to school every day with Adam the
replacement was complete. (115)
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In addition to offering a figurative view of twinship, as Booker regards Adam as a non-
genetic, older “twin” sibling, Morrison reflects, and, perhaps, outright references,
multiple African tropes related to twinship. In regarding Adam as a twin substitute,
Booker treats Adam as, in some ways, similar to an abiku—a child in Yoruba culture who
dies and is cyclically born back into the same family; as a near-abiku, Adam serves as the
familial replacement for the twin Booker lost, a presence to fill the “warm void walking
by [Booker’s] side.” Morrison may also be playing with the Yoruba ibeji concept,
26
as it
appears to others that Booker wants a statue of Adam, his surrogate twin, whom he has
lost (125). Morrison solidifies this reading of African reflections, as she conspicuously
mentions Africa in association with Booker’s replacement twin, saying, “Wasn’t there a
tribe in Africa that lashed the dead body to the one who had murdered it? That would
certainly be justice . . . “ (120). In these reflections of African cultural representations and
treatments of twinship, Morrison not only reveals the possibly inherent connections
between African and African American representations of twins; she demonstrates the
natural inclination in both African and African American cultures to reach for twinship as
a trope that reveals a cross-regional intersection between physical and spiritual worlds,
again reflecting experiences that reject strict binaries, in this case a rather Western binary
between life and death.
Recognition of the connections Morrison draws in the novel between her
characters and Africa is a rarity among scholars who analyze God Help the Child;
26
For the Yoruba, the orisha Ibeji positions twins as “manifesations of a ‘break through’ of the world of
spirits into human society” (“The Cult of Ibeji,” 231). Morrison may also be referencing Ere Ibeji figures,
or wooden twin carvings serving as doubles for entry into the spirits of departed twins.
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although it is not completely unique. In “Childhood is ‘not a story to pass on’: Trauma
and Memory Paradox in Toni Morrison’s God Help the Child,” Soumaya Bouacida
explains that “[m]emory centralizes Booker as the African voice when he relates the story
of his brother’s abuse” (401). Bouacida understands this abuse to be specifically “the
abuse of African culture” (401). Beyond this reading of African connections, other
acknowledgments of Morrison’s African references in the novel seem to be few and far
between. Bouacida’s psychoanalytic focus on trauma is the theoretical framing for most
scholars of the novel. Jiaying Guo, for instance, writes of the influence of trauma and fear
in Morrison’s creation of a novel that ultimately communicates that “black is the new
black,” a novel in which “American African mothers and daughters are in concord with
each other, where blackness is unique and treasurable” (Hope for African 3). Guo’s
reading of Morrison’s presentation of blackness as “the new black” which is “unique and
treasurable” supports my reading of Morrison’s use of Bride’s dark skin to subvert
traditional colorist ideas. Further supporting my idea of Morrison’s method of reverse
empowerment in ultimately communicating this positivity associated with blackness,
Fatoumata Keita, in “Conjuring Aesthetic Blackness: Abjection and Trauma in Toni
Morrison’s God Help the Child,” also reads the novel through a psychoanalytic, trauma-
focused lens, arguing that “[Morrison] summons up the most dreadful and repellent
stories of blackness in order to solve the racial trauma of her characters and reveal their
beautiful, lofty and sublime character” (53). Like Keita, I understand Morrison’s choice
to lean into the negative stereotypes of blackness, presenting Bride’s dark skin as
outwardly revolting, as a method of eventually presenting Bride’s power through her
confidence and physical allure. In the same way, I believe Morrison uses the negative
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stereotypes associated with twinship for the characters’ and novel’s ultimate advantage,
presenting twins as, at separate moments, repugnant, completely opposite, and
completely inseparable; Booker’s fight to cling to both of the “twin” brothers he lost, his
emotional attachment driving him to “hang on to him tooth and claw,” exemplifies this
inseparability (117). Like Morrison’s stereotypical presentation of blackness, I believe
Morrison’s caricatured depictions of twinship point to both shared cosmological and
mythological roots among African and African American literature and the specific
connection of stereotypical tropes as paradoxical tools for communicating anti-
stereotypical messages in African American literature, such as Morrison’s anti-colorist
themes in God Help the Child. Morrison continually points to this empowerment
specifically through her use of twinship in other works as well.
Given Morrison’s use of the trope of twinship in not just God Help the Child but
also Paradise and A Mercy, Morrison seems to be particularly infatuated with twins as a
narrative device. (This list of twin texts even neglects to include works, such as Beloved,
which might be read as containing depictions of what I would call “figurative twins,” or
characters who, like Denver and Beloved, are depicted with an alikeness or emotional
connectedness that makes them characteristically “twinny.”
27
Unlike criticism
surrounding God Help the Child, scholarship examining Paradise grants the trope of
twinship much more consideration. Perhaps most notably, in “Everything about her had
two sides to it’: The Foreigner’s Home in Toni Morrison’s Paradise,” Susan Neal
Mayberry recognizes the several twin figures—both biological and metaphorical—that
27
There is at least some evidence of critical readings of Morrison’s characters in Beloved as “twinned.” For
example, in the interview “A Conversation: Gloria Naylor and Toni Morrison” and in Toni Morrison and
the Bible: Contested Intertextualities, Gloria Naylor and Shirley A. Stave, respectively, read Beloved as
“the mirror, so to speak . . .a twin’ of other women in the book” (qtd. in Contested Intertextualities, 33)
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Morrison uses in ultimately conveying the “paired, twinned concepts” of host and home
(565). For Mayberry, the presence of twins in the novel reinforces “the possibility of
difference alongside belonging, found ultimately within the fluctuating home of the
individual psyche” (565). Mayberry examines the descriptions and relationships between
several characters she reads as twins, focusing specifically on Deacon and Steward,
Dovey and Soane, Coffee and Tea, and Merle and Perle, along with several other
characters who are not biologically related but can be read as being presented as
stereotypically twinned opposites, such as Mavis and Gigi, and Billie Delia and Arnette.
Even the convent and mansion could be read as existing within a kind of oppositional
twinship, according to Mayberry. While several scholars of Paradise share Mayberry’s
acknowledgment of the many instances of doubling or repetition in the novel,
28
few
others have read the instances of actual twins in the novel as a narrative trope. Among
scholarship surrounding Paradise, many have studied Morrison’s presentations of
cultural and racial hybridity. For example, in “Hybridizing the ‘City upon a Hill’ in Toni
Morrison’s Paradise,” Ana María Fraile-Marcos uses Homi Bhabha’s conceptions of
hybridity and mimicry in exploring Morrison’s creation of hybrid spaces that are sites of
resistance in the novel. According to Fraile-Marcos,”the citizens of Ruby are able to
reverse the racist discriminatory practices they suffer by appropriating the ideas which
oppressed and excluded them from mainstream America” (4). My observations of
Morrison’s clear depictions of hybridity throughout the novel align with Fraile-Marcos’s
understanding that the traditionalist behaviors among the Rubinites, behaviors based on
patriarchal command and racial purity, “corroborate Homi Bhabha’s view of mimicry as a
28
Namely, Paula Martín-Salván’s “The Arrivant in Toni Morrion’s Paradise: Devination, Iteration, and
Intersection.”
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site of resistance” (4). Additionally, scholars like Dana A. Williams argue that Morrison’s
presentation of hybridity resists notions of racial purity by making it unrecognizable:
“Toni Morrison contends that what she wanted to do with Paradise was not to erase race
but to force ‘readers to care about it or see if it disturbs them’ that race can be so blurred
that, without specific linguistic utterance, race can go unidentified” (“Playing on the
‘Darky,’” 181). Williams contends that this racial blurring allows Morrison to critique the
constructions of blackness and whiteness and to present them as flexible social constructs
as opposed to fixed biological ones. This critical discourse surrounding both twinship and
hybridity in Paradise makes quite clear that Morrison’s use of twins as a narrative device
and Morrison’s depiction of hybrid spaces and identities are features of the novel worthy
of scholarly consideration. However, from my observation, no one has considered the
ways in which Morrison’s depictions of twinship function as highlighters of that
hybridity.
Paradise tells the story of a community, Ruby, that was established as a way to
escape the racism and bigotry of white society. Within this narrative, Morrison also
describes the convent that offers a haven to those who seek refuge when the utopian
society of Ruby becomes a dystopia. Within the novel, Morrison offers a depiction of
twin leaders, Steward Morgan and Deacon, who have a great deal of influence in the
community and are committed to preserving the anti-white traditions and mission of the
society’s founders. Morrison writes, “The twins have powerful memories. Between them
they remember the details of everything that ever happened . . . And they have never
forgotten the message or the specifics of any story, especially the controlling one told to
them by their grandfather, the man who put the words in the Oven’s black mouth” (13).
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This inscription on the community Oven is a source of tension in the novel, as old and
young generations disagree about the original inscription and what it should read. The
possibility for multiple words and meanings to fit within the inscription on the Oven
introduces a fluidity that challenges the strictness with which the society and its leaders
practice their authority. Steward Morgan’s and Deacon’s adherence to the strict moral
codes and hierarchies of the society also exemplifies this subversion, given that the
society projects an inverse reflection of white society’s bigotry, racism, and colorism
inflicted upon black citizens. In this way, Steward Morgan’s and Deacon’s twinship,
which is portrayed (undoubtedly with intention) in a stereotypical, nearly physically and
behaviorally indistinguishable way, becomes yet another aspect within Ruby that is
challenged by fluid, permeable conceptions of hybridity.
Morrison establishes this theme of hybridity as an immanent quality of Paradise,
starting from the very first scene of the novel with Morrison’s descriptions of the
Convent’s transformation from the school for indigenous children to the mansion for
marginalized women:
A mansion where bisque and rose-tone marble floors segue into teak ones.
Isinglass holds yesterday’s light and patterns walls that were stripped and
whitewashed fifty years ago. The ornate bathroom fixtures, which sickened the
nuns, were replaced with good plain spigots, but the princely tubs and sinks,
which could not be inexpensively removed, remain coolly corrupt. The
embezzler’s joy that could be demolished was, particularly in the dining room,
which the nuns converted into a schoolroom, where stilled Arapaho girls once sat
and learned to forget. (3-4)
109
The marbling of the floors and speckling of the mansion’s fixtures illustrate the merging
of old and new, reflecting temporal hybridity. Additionally, Morrison’s introduction of the
mansion’s past as a school for Arapaho children firmly establishes the Convent as a space
of racial and cultural hybridity, directly opposing the demand for racial singularity in
Ruby. Intriguingly, Morrison’s representation of twinship is also intertwined with
depictions of the Convent’s hybridity throughout the novel. Even aside from the
metaphorical twins in the forms of the several replications and physical and behavioral
duplicates and opposites in Ruby, Morrison uses biological twins in highlighting this
hybridity associated with the Convent. Specifically, Mavis’s twin babies, Merle and
Pearl, are key figures in highlighting this hybridity. Firstly, the infant twins serve as the
catalyst for Mavis’s entry into the Convent, as their deaths, and the subsequent unraveling
of her relationships with her husband and children, drive Mavis away from California and
towards the mansion. As the first outsider to enter the Convent, Mavis inevitably brings
cultural difference into the community. Merle and Pearl are also integrated into Mavis’
envisioning of the Convent’s past: “[S]he had an outer-rim sensation that the kitchen was
crowded with children—laughing? singing? –two of whom were Merle and Pearl” (41).
By placing the twins directly into Mavis’ mental conjuring of the Convent’s history,
Morrison presents Merle and Pearl as figures of twinship that are interwoven with the
mansion’s cultural, racial, and temporal hybridity. This hybridity Morrison illustrates,
then, has a connection to stereotypical depictions of twinship, as both the ‘matchy’
rhyming of the twins’ names and the manner of the twins’ deaths reflect single-narrative
portraits of twins, their suffocation in a hot car bringing to mind the cultural histories of
twin abandonment and infanticide in Igbo and Efik tribes, among others. Given
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Morrison’s other African cultural reflections throughout the novel—e.g., the reliance on
oral storytelling, the women’s integration of African spirituality in the Convent, etc.—
Merle and Pearl seem to offer yet another plausible example of this African parallelism,
whether intentional or inadvertent. Like Morrison’s depictions of twinship in God Help
the Child, however, the twin figures of Merle and Pearl are not simply evidence of
transcontinental typecast representations; they demonstrate a paradox in that they exhibit
a shared compulsion to embrace harmful stereotypical lore for the sake of achieving
power—in this case, power associated with racial and cultural hybridity’s inherent
quashing of notions or demands for racial and cultural purity.
Morrison demonstrates this embrace of twin stereotypes again in her novel
published a decade later—A Mercy (2008). Morrison’s depiction of twinship in A Mercy
is an imagined twinship, and, therefore, critical commentary on the role of twins in the
novel seems to be, understandably, sparse. Of the scholars who mention twinship in A
Mercy, most focus on Sorrow’s imagined companion as simply a figment of her creativity
that allows her to experience a kind of freedom she would not otherwise experience. For
example, in “Toni Morrison’s Disrupted Girls and Their Disturbed Girlhoods: The Bluest
Eye and A Mercy, “Susmita Roye argues that Twin allows Sorrow to escape the labor
demanded of her as an enslaved person. Additionally, Steve H. Monk analyzes Twin’s
role in breaking stereotypes associated with imaginary friendship: “In showing how Twin
leads Sorrow to a better life using light imagery, Morrison shatters the conventional view
of imaginary friends” (“Literary Function” 1). Like Roye and Monk, I understand the
realism with which Morrison presents Twin to be more akin to an actual character than an
unreal figment of Sorrow’s mind. While few seem to read Twin as a character as real as
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any other character in the novel, Twin is treated, in many ways, as a literal twin, for
instance possessing an individualized language that is distinct from anyone else.
Morrison writes, “[Sorrow] did not mind when they called her Sorrow so long as Twin
kept using her real name” (137). In this way, Morrison presents Twin as a personified,
even if only imagined, concept of twinship, the stereotype of an inseparable being who is
innately aware of Sorrow’s desires and her truest identity that is hidden from others.
Morrison further writes, “Twin wanted company to talk or walk or play . . . Preferable, of
course, was when Twin called from the mill door or whispered up close into her ear. Then
she would quit any chore and follow her identical self” (137). Through Sorrow’s
playfulness in this passage, in addition to the convention of identicalness, Morrison
presents twinship as a construction that allows Sorrow to temporarily break free from the
racial roles that define her as an enslaved character, granting her agency in her ability to
stop her labor, an ability that Sorrow’s singleton, enslaved counterparts do not possess.
Alongside this rejection of social and racial rigidity, the novel presents a fictive family of
sorts in the Vaark family, an interracial, interclass family-like group that resists racial and
social boundaries. Morrison also presents Twin as playing an integral role in introducing
Sorrow to the Vaark family. Describing Sorrow’s journey eventually leading to the Vaark
home, Morrison writes, “Sorrow had never set foot on land and was terrified of leaving
ship for shore. Twin made it possible” (209). Here, not only is Twin credited with easing
Sorrow’s transition from the ship to land; Twin’s presence is described as a crucial factor
in Sorrow’s voyage to the Vaark family. Twin, then, could be interpreted as the character
most responsible for Sorrow’s integration into the Vaark family. Because of Sorrow’s
hybridity as a biracial person, this integration brings racial hybridity to the already
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hybridized Vaark community. In this way, even as a mere imaginary friend/sibling, Twin
serves as an impetus for Sorrow’s entry into the family and hence racial hybridity’s entry
into Morrison’s narrative. This power that Morrison grants Twin to act as the instigator of
Sorrow’s integration into the family seemingly portrays Twin as a near-supernatural
double.
29
Therefore, as in God Help the Child and Paradise, Morrison, in A Mercy, also
relies on stereotypical narratives of twinship that envision twins as, in different novels
and moments, completely similar, completely opposite, exceptionally objectionable (even
to the point of abandonment), and supernatural. Morrison’s use of such twin stereotypes
to bring about her characters’ resistance of the categorical definitions that “belong to the
definers,”
30
specifically through the creation or accentuation of hybridity that rejects
racial and cultural binaries sheds light on the paradoxical nature of the achievement of
colonial resistance—a power wrapped up in hybridity that presents a flexibility of
conceptual boundaries, such as racial and cultural borders; ironically, this power is
reached through a subscription to single narratives that place people into rigid categories,
such as twin stereotypes. Importantly, my assertions of the empowerment through
colonial resistance established through hybridity here, and throughout this dissertation,
are less interested in actual materialist impacts of that empowerment and more concerned
with the achievement of powerful knowledge about how to create those tangible impacts,
specifically through the clever employment of the stereotypical to point to innovative
amalgamations of racial, cultural, and regional hybridity that evoke colonial anxiety.
29
In this presentation of Twin as a supernatural double figure, Morrison creates of Twin a trope similar to
figures within West African mythologies, as seen among the Yoruba and many others, that characterize
twins as possessing hypernormal and, in some cases, paranormal, powers.
30
Morrison, Toni. Beloved, Random House, 1987, p. 225.
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Where the Line Bleeds
Twinship is also a trope employed by Jesmyn Ward in her debut novel Where the
Line Bleeds (2008). While, perhaps, critically undercelebrated compared to Ward’s later
novels, Where the Line Bleeds captures similar themes of racial and cultural border
crossing as Morrison’s and Kelley’s works with twin figures. Often, similar themes in
Where the Line Bleeds are observed within larger analyses of other works. For instance,
in “Piecing Together African Americans’ Future: The Subversive Relationship between
Children and Death as a Space of Cultural and Historical Reappropriation in Jesmyn
Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing,” Elisa Pesce studies racial and cultural identities and the
“direct and indirect consequences of the state of policing in the twenty-first-century US
by focusing on children characters in Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing” (130).
Similarly, in Chiara Patrizi’s “‘We Ain’t Going Nowhere. We Here’: Survival and
Witness in Jesmyn Ward’s Fiction and Nonfiction,” Where the Line Bleeds is briefly
mentioned in an overall examination of Ward’s use of “polyphonic narration,
autobiography, and supernatural elements” that impact depictions of “blackness and
being” (70). Nicole Dib also mentions Ward’s depictions of black identities in Where the
Line Bleeds in ultimately exploring the ways that Ward’s road trip narrative in Sing,
Unburied, Sing “demonstrates the immobilizing and haunting effects of racism on
contemporary black lives” (“Haunting Roadscapes” 134-135). And in Chronicling
Stankonia: The Rise of the Hip-Hop South, Regina Bradley traces the influence of music,
film, and literature on contemporary Southern identities, reading Where the Line Bleeds,
among many other texts, through the lens of trap culture (93). While these scholars, and
others, usually acknowledge Ward’s protagonists’ nature as twins, very rarely is their
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twinship read as a trope that specifically contributes to Ward’s depictions of hybridity in
the novel. Thorough analysis of Ward’s use of twinship as a narrative device, however,
demonstrates the racial, cultural, and geographical border-rejecting spirit of Ward’s
fiction, even if this spirit is revealed through a somewhat-stereotypical depiction of
twinship as an unbreakable binary. Ward portrays her twin protagonists, Christophe and
Joshua, as paradoxically, simultaneously emotionally close and distant from one another,
while she also portrays Mississippi’s cultural and regional boundaries in the novel as
paradoxically, simultaneously physically permeable and inescapable. Ward notes this
simultaneous permeability and inescapability herself in an interview with Danielle K.
Taylor. In “Literary Voice of the Dirty South: an Interview with Jesmyn Ward,” Taylor
acknowledges, “Your writing is very grounded in the Gulf [C]oast with fluid movement
from New Orleans to Mississippi communities” (267). Ward responds by confirming the
intentionality of these geographical border crossings alongside the depiction of her small-
town Mississippi setting as a site in which people become (inevitably or apathetically)
stuck: “My idea of the Dirty South is that there’s a certain rawness to the art that comes
out of it. A certain honesty. A willingness to bring secrets and despair and hope and other
messy human emotions to life” (267). I interpret this “dirty” honesty to be the
illumination of hybridity, a depiction of the South that, like Ward’s depictions of race,
culture, and regionality, rejects strict categorization; it is a space of both pain and
comfort, financial barrenness and familial prosperity. The stuck-but-freely-moving reality
that Ward identifies in this interview is a stereotype-breaking narrative of the South made
possible by Ward’s several depictions of hybridity throughout Where the Line Bleeds. I
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understand the presence of twinship in the novel to be crucial to Ward’s presentations of
that hybridity.
Throughout the novel, Ward sends the twin brother protagonists down two
diverging paths, as one brother lands a job after graduation, and the other does not,
leading the latter to become involved in a drug ring. Despite these drastically different
life trajectories, Ward’s descriptions of the twins’ naturally close relationship include
references to their shared language and even their figurative swapping of skins: “They
harbor red their secrets and held on to them: Christophe with his occasional slow,
smoldering anger, and Joshua with his own occasional quick, glancing, irrational
recklessness. Yes, they conformed to character, but these two traded skin like any set of
twins” (69). These physical depictions of the twins’ attachment to one another in spite of
their differences reflects the way Ward narrativizes the Southern landscape’s attachment
to its people even in spite of their movement out of its physical borders. This idea of the
landscape’s attachment to its people is consistent with theoretical understandings of
landscapes within postcolonial studies. W. J. T. Mitchell’s Landscape and Power is
especially worth mentioning here. Mitchell’s essays, analyzing landscape “not as an
object to be seen or a text to be read, but as a process by which social and subjective
identities are formed” makes of the landscape in Where the Line Bleeds an active builder
of cultural and social identities (1). This intertwining of landscape and personal identity
formation is especially evident in scenes in which Ward illustrates the landscape’s
physical attachment to the characters. For instance, Ward writes of the twins’ basketball
team traveling from a game in the Mississippi Delta back to their home on the Gulf
Coast. Ward writes, “When they arrived home at the end of the trip, the team had
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discovered red dust from the roads had sifted through the open windows of the bus to
drift down on them, coated their uniforms, and turned them pink” (100). Here, the Delta
landscape’s physical adherence to the players reflects the lasting impact of the racism and
other cultural differences the team witnessed in the Delta environment. In this way, Ward
presents the idea of culture as, like the physical landscape, moveable and border-crossing,
inevitably attached to those who experience it. The stereotypical depictions of twinship in
the novel—Joshua’s and Christophe’s unbreakable, almost desperate attachment to one
another—reflect this attachment despite physical distance. Ward’s depictions of culture’s
ability to traverse physical boundaries and subvert North-South and urban-rural
dichotomies, which we see in several moments throughout the novel, is also reflected by
Joshua’s and Christophe’s inseparable bond that likewise subverts binaries that either
posit them as wholly identical and attached at the hip or completely positioned at separate
ends of phenotypic and behavioral polarities. Instead, the twins are presented as both
physically separated and emotionally inseparable, able to exist simultaneously as separate
beings with separate life trajectories and deeply connected brothers with an indissoluble
bond that transcends their physical separation. Because the brothers cannot be easily
categorized as either the stereotypical idea of innately, peculiarly close twins or siblings
who have no stronger of a connection than singleton siblings, Joshua and Christophe
reflect the binary resistance that the entire novel emits.
With this same complexity, Ward reflects a Mississippi that is, altogether, resistant
to strict stereotyping as wholly racist and impoverished. Ward’s cultural, racial, and
socioeconomic descriptions of Bois Sauvage are a mixture of expected and
unconventional accounts. Regarding the protagonists’ financial status, the twins are
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depicted as nurtured and well-supported by their grandmother, Ma-mee, as well as their
uncle; however, Ward also describes their economic circumstances as uncertain at best:
“Ma-mee maintained that she had kept them fed and fat when they were little . . . Joshua
remembered otherwise. He remembered eating handfuls of cornflakes and watery
powdered milk, of eating tuna for weeks at a time, of dreaming of pizza as an eight-year-
old. He remembered being perpetually hungry, regardless of how much he ate” (72).
Despite this somewhat stereotypical vision of Southern poverty, Ward also includes
several scenes that feature the family’s access to food, such as large spreads for holiday
feasts, like “greens and corn bread and black-eyed peas”—a traditional Southern New
Year’s Day meal (10). Through these conflicting images of the family’s monetary
position, Ward refuses a strictly cliché illustration of the family as completely
impoverished, creating a socioeconomically hybrid depiction of a Mississippi community
that is categorically neither poverty-stricken nor financially bountiful. Ward also
demonstrates hybridized racial identities, particularly in the character of Javon, a friend
of Joshua and Christophe. Describing Javon’s physical characteristics, Ward writes,
“When Christophe saw Javon on his first day of first grade on the bus, he’d been shocked
by his coarse, fiery red hair. Christophe could not understand how someone who looked
black could have such white coloring.” (110). While Ward certainly depicts scenes of
strict racial segregation, specifically in scenes that take place in the Mississippi Delta,
Ward’s demonstration of racial hybridity—both Javon’s personal racial ambiguity and the
community’s racial hybridity with the presence of Javon, along with others racially
ambiguous characters—creates a racial merging that rejects Bois Sauvage’s racial
classification as a purely black community.
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While Ward honestly acknowledges its existence as a place generally riddled with
economic hardship and harrowing scars from institutionalized racial and social cruelty of
the past and present, Ward also depicts Mississippi as a place of solace and comfort for
the protagonists, a place to which they, upon leaving, deeply long to return. Secondary
criticism on Ward has widely recognized this illustration of the strength of Mississippi’s
communal strength and care in spite of the state’s systemic shortcomings; namely,
Christopher W. Clark, Alvin Henry, and Barry Cole, among several others, perceive
Ward’s sense of home and community through feminist, ecocritical, and “shunned space”
theoretical framings.
31
Even Ward’s depictions of the region’s landscape demonstrate this
complex characterization that defies stock portrayals. While Ward paints Bois Sauvage
as, predictably, monotonous in its oppressive humidity, writing, “The day would be hot
like all the rest” (65), she also portrays the unsung beauty of the Mississippi coast, which
is often unseen even by the novel’s characters: “He could see the barrier islands floating
on the horizon of the water, appearing like bristling shadows of elongated reeds as they
siphoned the current and blocked the clean blue-green wash of the Gulf of Mexico,
blocked the water that swept up from the Caribbean . . .” (34). Within this portrait of the
Mississippi Gulf Coast, the hybridity created by the sea—the colorful blending of waters
from separate islands—creates an image of Mississippi that challenges overused images
of Mississippi as simply “the dirty South”—a rejection of racism, as I will argue.
31
Clark’s “What Comes to the Surface: Storms, Bodies, and Community in Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the
Bones,” Henry’s “Jesmyn Ward’s Post-Katrina Black Feminism: Memory and Myth through Salvaging,”
and Barry Cole’s “Shunned Space Theory as a Holistic Framework for Understanding Characters and
Communities in Selecting Writings of Jesmyn Ward, Richard Wright and William Faulkner” are a few
seminal examples of these theoretical framings.
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The multi-dimensionality with which Ward characterizes the twins’ relationship
points to these binary-rejecting portrayals of the region’s racial, cultural, socioeconomic,
and environmental facets. While Ward certainly portrays a version of twinship that is far
less prescriptive than most other writers who use twinship as a narrative device, there are
some stereotypical elements that persist throughout Ward’s depictions of her twin
characters. In descriptions of the brothers’ diverging “career” paths, for example,
Christophe and Joshua are portrayed as opposites, again propagating the notion of mirror-
image or photo-negative twins.
32
Despite this partly stereotypical depiction of the
brothers’ twinship, Ward’s representation of their relationship does not completely
conform to this cliché, Joshua’s and Christophe proving their persistent closeness through
their physical and emotional reunification at the end of the novel and demonstrating what
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie understands to be the problem with stereotypes—“not that
they are untrue, but that they are incomplete” (“Danger,” 13:14-13:20). In this way,
Christophe and Joshua, in their twinship that cannot be neatly classified according to any
one stereotypical category of twinship, reflect Ward’s rejection of single narratives that
would assume that people who choose to live in Mississippi do so only because they lack
either the intelligence or the resources to escape the impoverished area in which they are
trapped. Through the stereotypical closeness of Ward’s twin characters, which
paradoxically challenges their simultaneous stereotypical portrayal as opposites, Ward
reflects the intimacy between people and their homes, no matter their flaws, empowering
32
Ward’s presentation of the brothers as strict opposites, either consciously or unconsciously, echoes
African mythologies, such as the Luba, Bamana, Hausa, or Senufo, all of whom hold twinship as a symbol
of the balance of oppositional forces, such as life and death. This reading of African mythology seems
consistent with other possible readings of thematic parallels to African storytelling throughout the novel—
e.g., Ward’s treatment of the landscape as a character, Ward’s emphasis on community and familial lineage,
Ward’s attention to cultural traditions that backdrop the novel, etc.
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the characters within her novel, and the real-world people they represent, to be read as
agentic inhabitants of the homes and communities in which they reside. This
empowerment inherent in this subversion of the single story of her Mississippi home—
one of the most densely populated black areas in the country—lies in Ward’s challenging
of largely race-based stereotypes of the “Dirty, Dirty South” as inescapably impoverished
and socially and racially hopeless. In this way, with the help of her twin characters, Ward
creates a complex depiction of the South that is a powerful form of resistance against
simplistic, damaging visions of the South.
The Vanishing Half
Similar to Ward’s characterizations of her twin characters, Bennett uses
simultaneous “wholly alike” and “completely opposite” twinship stereotypes to describe
her twin protagonists in The Vanishing Half. Unlike Ward, however, Bennett depicts
twinship as a mutable construct, shifting between the sister’s identities as twins with
identical physical appearances and singeltons with completely inversed physical
appearances and life trajectories. Even from the start of the novel, Bennett describes the
sisters’ performance of twinship as a day-to-day fluctuation: “One morning, the twins
crowded in front of their bathroom mirror, four identical girls fussing with their hair. The
next, the bed was empty, the covers pulled back like any other day, taut when Stella made
it, crumpled when Desiree did” (4). Intriguingly, criticism surrounding Bennett’s novel
seems most interested in Bennett’s use of racial passing as a trope, so much so that most
scholarship seems to only minimally acknowledge the performativity of twinship that
also creates the identity shifting on which critical discourse tends to focus. In “Getting
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into Character: Racial Passing and the Limitations of Performativity and Performance in
Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half,” for example, Ohad Reznick examines Stella’s racial
performance in the novel, concluding that Bennett’s use of the passing trope both
challenges the black-white binary and demonstrates the ultimate failure of whiteface to
convincingly shift racial perceptions at the societal level. Similarly, Sterling S. Neill
focuses on Stella’s racial performance, arguing that Bennett experiments with the ideals
of Southern hospitality, specifically aspects of white dishonesty and entitlement, and,
through this experimentation, “critiques hostile motivations that ultimately complicate
identity construction for Black individuals” (“Bless Your Heart” 53). Likewise, Paul
Spickard pays special attention to the trope of racial passing in The Vanishing Half,
among other novels. Spickard is critical of Bennett’s portrayal of the racial passing, as it,
like most fictional passing portrayals, according to Spickard, is inconsistent with real-life
accounts of racial identity transformations: “The passing trope is one of the great, hoary,
and utterly misbegotten themes of twentieth-century American literature and film. . . As
we shall learn, there have been some people whose lives fit the passing description. But
they are a tiny minority among race changers” (“Shape Shifting” 2). While each of these
critical works mention Stella’s and Desiree’s nature as twins, they represent a trend in
critical discourse of reading the sisters’ twinship as a fixed, biological construction
without dedicating much attention to the ways in which Bennett portrays twinship as a
performance that also conveys the flexibility of personal identities.
Contributing to this traditional view of Bennett’s representation of twinship as
strictly biological and immutable, in several moments throughout the novel, Bennett
treats her twins rather stereotypically. For instance, Bennett portrays Stella and Desiree as
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a spectacle, so jarringly alike that they are even occasionally described as a single being.
Bennett writes, “Twin girls, creamy skin, hazel eyes, wavy hair. He would have marveled
at them. For the child to be a little more perfect than the parents. What could be more
wonderful than that” (6). In describing the girls’ physical beauty as light-skinned black
children in this passage, Bennett uses the singular “child,” thereby including a stereotype
of twins—a conception of twins as so alike that they are treated as a single entity rather
than two distinct individuals. This treatment of the sisters as one single being is repeated
later as the sisters leave their hometown for New Orleans, are employed illegally, and are
forced to hide in a bathroom to avoid detection by inspectors: “Later, when she
remembered Dixie Laundry, Desiree only pictured herself balancing on the toilet lid,
pressed hard against Stella’s back” (55-56). In this scene, Stella’s and Desiree’s bodies
are entangled so closely, meshed together to avoid being seen, that Bennett paints them as
a near-single entity, working together to become as small and imperceptible as possible.
Bennett’s illustrations of the sisters as a singular figure create a stereotypical view of their
twinship as solitary and inseparable.
33
However, Bennett also complicates her portrayal
of the sisters as, conventionally, completely alike and completely indivisible by
conforming also to stereotypes of opposition, concomitantly presenting the twins as
opposites in both behavior and physical appearance. Bennett especially highlights the
sisters’ opposite personalities and appearances in her descriptions of their separate,
contrasting life trajectories: “[A]fter a year, the twins scattered, their lives splitting as
33
In this portrayal of the sisters as stereotypically inseparable, Bennett parallels African mythological
visions of two-in-one pairs, such as the Egyptian twin-gods Isis and Osiris, or Yoruba twin gods, whose
inseparable spiritual oneness is revered to such an extent that ere ibeji must accompany living children
whose twins have died. See Ourene’s “Ibeji: The Cult of Yoruba Twins,” previously referenced throughout
this project.
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evenly as their shared egg. Stella became white and Desiree married the darkest man she
could find” (4). Bennett continues reflecting the sisters’ converse lives in instances of
heavy light and color imagery throughout the novel, such as descriptions of Desiree’s
treatment of her daughter, Jude’s, skin color: “Bright colors looked vulgar against dark
skin, everyone said, but she refused to hide her daughter in drab olive greens or grays”
(40). Bennett’s repeated veiled and apparent references to the twins’ physical and
behavioral contradistinction, the frequent contrasts between dark and light, drab and
bright, for example, could also be viewed as echoes of the persistent representations of
antithetical twins throughout African mythologies, such as Nut and Geb, twin god and
goddesses of Earth and sky, respectively, or Mawu and Lisa, associated with creation of
the moon and sun, respectively, in Dahomey mythology.
34
While similar twin
mythologies—for representations of twins as both completely alike, even singular beings,
and directly opposed in nature—exist throughout a plethora of cultures, from Greek and
Roman lore
35
to Hindu stories,
36
several moments throughout The Vanishing Half both
subtly and expressly encourage such comparisons specifically to African narrative
traditions. Bennett invites these parallel readings from her very first scene, describing
Desiree’s dramatic re-entrance into her childhood home, the community of Mallard,
Louisiana, with her daughter Jude. Although Desiree is light-skinned, Jude is described as
“black as tar”: ‘Blueblack,’ he said ‘like she flown direct from Africa’” (3). Even aside
from such obvious references to Africa or thematic overlaps with African narratives, such
as the importance of cultural heritage and the exploration of self-identity, the novel
34
See Ikenga-Metuh’s “Religious Concepts in West African Cosmogonies: A Problem of Interpretation.”
35
Here, I am referencing Gemini dieties Kastor and Polydeuces, or more colloquially known as Castor and
Pollux.
36
Here, I am referencing Hindu twin dieties The Ashvins, or the Asvini Kumaras and Asvinau.
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mirrors African storytelling, its focalization through several characters throughout
drawing on the oral tradition, and the sisters’ eventual returns to Mallard echoing the
African hero’s journey and circular conceptions of time. Furthermore, the novel as a
whole could conceivably be read as a metaphorical reference to the diasporic experience,
Stella’s and Desiree’s physical separation representing the division between Africans and
African Americans, among other African diasporic groups. In these narrative parallels,
Bennett’s novel exhibits the echoing of African storytelling, further demonstrating this
chapter’s, and project’s, claim of the prospect of African and African American cultural
entanglement.
Interestingly, Bennett’s reliance on both the “absolutely alike” and “entirely
different” twin stereotypes works together to create an image of twinship as performative.
Bennet’s presentation of the performance of twinship is particularly observable in
narration that highlights the stereotypical interplay of the sisters’ twinship. Narration
focalized through either Stella or Desiree make this performativity all the more evident:
Sometimes being a twin had felt like living with another version of yourself. That
person existed for everyone, probably, an alternative self that lived only in the
mind. But hers was real. Stella rolled over in bed each morning and looked into
her eyes. Other times it felt like living with a foreigner. Why are you not more
like me? she’d think, glancing over at Desiree. How did I become me and you
become you? Maybe she was only quiet because Desiree was not. Maybe they’d
spent their lives together modulating each other, making up for what the other
lacked. Like how at their father’s funeral, Stella barely spoke, and when someone
asked her a question, Desiree answered instead. At first it unnerved Stella, a
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person speaking to her and Desiree responding: Like throwing her own voice. But
soon she felt comfortable disappearing. You could say nothing and, in your
nothingness, feel free. (234)
This description of Stella’s internalization of her twinship as a performance, “existing for
everyone” uses the contradictory stereotypes of twins as total duplicates, sometimes even
a single being, and twins as opposite parts of a whole in order to create an image of Stella
and Desiree as forming their twinship around social expectations. Stella and Desiree
“modulate,” or fill in the gaps, created by their counterpart, conveying the notion of
natural personality as a production based on choice. Desiree is outspoken, and, therefore,
Stella chooses to remain quiet. Desiree’s choice to “marry the darkest man she could
find” is also initially presented as a decision based less on emotional or sexual attraction
and more on gravitation towards a lifestyle opposite of Stella’s, thus maintaining the
twins’ performance as a binary (4). Contradictorily, Bennett also demonstrates the
performativity of the sisters’ similitude. For instance, Bennett writes, “Desiree had spent
years studying Stella. The way she played with her hem, how she tucked her hair behind
her ear or gazed up hesitantly before saying hello. She could mirror her sister, mimic her
voice, inhabit her body in her own” (13). In this way, Bennett ironically uses multiple
clichéd forms of twinship in a rejection of typical notions of twinship as an immutable,
biological construction.
In Stella’s and Desiree’s performances as twins, Bennett reflects larger messages
about identity transfiguration and individual agency to defy supposedly fixed categories
of identity assigned at birth. Among the most obvious of these constructions that Bennett
presents as performative is race. Of course, this is most apparent in the case of Stella,
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who abandons her life as a twin, marries a white man, and lives life as a white woman—
what Desiree’s husband Sam calls “playacting” (21). Sam’s dismissive reaction to Stella’s
racial performance, saying that she will eventually “get tired of all that” and “come
running back, feeling foolish,” immediately after learning of Stella’s existence as
Desiree’s former twin solidifies the connection Bennett draws between the sisters’
performative twinship and their racial performance; both are aspects of their identities
that are mutable on a personal level, even if those changes revealing such performativity
are scorned by society. What is more, Stella’s initial experimentation with racial passing
portrays the performativity of race as a conscious form of play: “The first time she’d ever
been white, Stella couldn’t wait to tell Desiree what she’d done” (257). Here, Bennett
portrays the act of passing as an exciting stealth game. Bennett further depicts Stella’s
passing as an act of mimicry. Focalized through Stella’s perspective, Bennett writes,
“There was nothing to being white except boldness. You could convince anyone you
belonged somewhere if you acted like you did” (149). In this sense, the act of racial
passing, for Stella, is an act of trickery, a performance that, like her performance of
twinship, relies on her ability to impersonate. In the same way that Stella’s and Desiree’s
performances of twinship reveal the breakability of an allegedly rigid biological-social
binary, Stella’s performance of whiteness blurs the supposedly clear-cut boundaries
separating black and white, granting Stella power to not only experience the social perks
of whiteness but to uncover the absurdity of whiteness’s claim of inherent superiority and
refinement. In this way, Stella’s racial performance aligns with Jacques Lacan’s
conception of mimicry as an act of camouflage that doesn’t blend in with the background
but, rather, reveals the background to be just as “mottled” as that which it conceals (qtd.
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in Bhabha 125). Alternatively stated, Bennett’s treatment of race as a production reveals
racial categorization in general to be a sham because it exhibits the incomplete truths and
outright falsehoods upon which those categories were formed.
Other aspects of the novel also communicate this shattering of boundaries. Firstly,
Bennett depicts the community of Mallard specifically as a space that is, ironically, both
insular and liberating from outside bigotry, “a third place,” defying categorization as
strictly an inclusive or exclusive community (5). Additionally, the novel itself defies strict
genre categorization, at moments reading like historical fiction or domestic drama, at
others, performing more as a mystery or psychological fiction. To this extent, the book
itself adopts the same performativity as the characters’ shifting regional spaces and racial
identities that grant the novel its essence of flexibility. Through this flexibility, the novel
not only meets various genre expectations but renders those expectations completely
futile. Bennett’s presentation of the performativity of twinship is the ultimate symbol of
this flexibility that Bennett continually illustrates throughout the novel. One of Bennett’s
final visions of the future of Mallard especially emphasizes the futility that this flexibility
highlights. Describing the racially segregated cemetery in which Stella’s and Desiree’s
mother was buried, Bennett writes, “A strong hurricane could flood the cemetery, the old
caskets swinging open, filling with brown water. Some gravedigger rooting through the
mud for gold watches and diamond rings, marveling over his good fortune, would step
over bones, not knowing the difference” (342). By depicting nature as the indiscriminate
annihilator of the racial classifications that separate the cemetery, Bennett reflects the
ultimate message of the novel, of which the protagonists’ twinship is at the heart—the
stereotype-determined expectations upon which classifications for constructions such as
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race, region, and culture are formed are, in the end, worthless. Paradoxically, it is through
Stella’s and Desiree’s fluctuating performances of clichéd conceptions of twinship that
this categorical worthlessness is revealed.
These analyses of many of America’s most famous contemporary literary
examples of African American twinship reveal several realities. Firstly, in both subtle and
overt ways, these texts reveal the persistence of African cosmological and mythological
echoes in African American literature, reflecting what nineteenth- and twentieth-century
philosopher Edvard Westermarck would call the “psychic unity” of old and new, African
and African American storytelling. In this way, African and African American literature
may be read as twins themselves, reflecting twins’ stereotypical interconnection and
inseparability in spite of artificial borders, such as genre or geography, that might
challenge their attachment. This rejection of such boundaries is empowering, as it allows
African diaspora literature to be read with a voice that harkens back to its forebears, a
voice that resists the binary between black and white, Africa and the West, the enslaved
and the oppressor. Ironically, in African American literature, as in African literature, this
rejection of conformist conceptual borders is accomplished through the employment of
stereotypes regarding twins. This subscription to the stereotypical reveals the inherently
paradoxical nature of African diaspora literature; it, at times, attaches to rigidly
conventional portrayals which would ordinarily be harmful for the sake of highlighting
the fragility of other constructions, such as race, region, and culture, among other
structures. In the latter portion of this dissertation, I will explore such flexible constructs
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in forms of media beyond literature, revealing the border-shattering nature of all black art
and culture.
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CHAPTER THREE
Nollywood and Disney Duos: Merged Racial, Regional, and Cultural Borders in African
and African American Cinema and Television Featuring Twins
Two mirror-image, ghoulish girls stand side-by-side, glaring maliciously with
glowing eyes, indistinguishable tattered dresses, and thick-lipped sneers. As the camera
slowly zooms in on their grotesque expressions, their similarly contorted bodies fade out
of frame, and their identical appearances fully come into focus. The monstrous duo is
alike in nearly every way, both black, one slightly lighter in skin tone, but with
coordinating red bows tied to the ends of bristling braids and red lipstick smeared across
malformed teeth making them look bloodstained. This image is a double caricature. As
the television series Lovecraft Country’s impression of the many Jim Crow caricatures of
Uncle Tom’s Cabin’s original Topsy character—a character originally meant to resemble
the horrors of slavery—this sinister portrait of Topsy and Bopsy is the series’ obvious
demonized reiteration of history’s racist “pickaninny” parodies of Stowe’s original
character. Topsy and Bopsy also exemplify the recurrent treatment of duality as petrifying
within the horror genre—a trope that especially manifests as menacing twins and look-
alikes. We see these depictions of diabolical duos time and time again in nearly all forms
of media from Stanley Kubrick’s classic unsettling twins in The Shining and American
Horror Story’s repeated representations of twins as physically disfigured to Ursula’s
identical evil eel sidekicks Flotsam and Jetsam in Disney’s The Little Mermaid and even
LEGO’s creepy alien Skull Twins toys. In Lovecraft Country’s perpetuation of the trope
of the disturbing duo, Topsy and Bopsy are, in two senses, a double caricature, a
caricature of doubles and also a parodic sketch of black children. Interestingly, while this
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unnerving image certainly exemplifies the harmful dissemination of exaggerated,
prejudiced visions of both twins and black children, even when twins are presented
without such obviously freakish embellishments, the result for twins is quite the same.
Twins, in virtually all media and all genres, are reliably depicted in ways that treat them
as outcasts or unusual spectacles to be observed with awed fascination, even when their
twinship is presented as a positive attribute. There is rarely, if ever, a moment, in fiction
or in reality, when someone’s twinship is revealed without that twinship carrying some
kind of significance. Twins are always the source of intense interest for one reason or
another. In the simplest of terms, twins always mean something.
This reliance on the stereotype of eerie doubles, even if this eeriness is drawn for
the purpose of exposing the horrors of racism, is a prime example of the spectacularized,
often harmful images of twinship that consistently inundate entertainment. Such images
of twins, of course, have a large impact on the internalization and identity formation of
real-life twins. The double inner perception of twinship—that is the version of twinship
twins experience as a direct, everyday reality, combined with the version they experience
through film and television—seems to be a difficult one to convey. The perception of this
pseudo-dichotomy of lived and filmed experiences is consistent with the abundance of
knowledge within the field of film theory surrounding both representation and the impact
of representation on children in particular. Regarding filmic and televised representations
of twins specifically, scholar of American literature and popular culture Karen Dillon
understands children’s fascination with twin characters to be the result of the
commodification of twinship as a heightened viewing experience, what Dillon calls “a
‘double the pleasure’ effect” (The Spectacle 118). Additionally, Dillon interprets this
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marketing of twinship as a kind of “choose your own adventure” advertisement: “Most
stories of twins for children present twins as opposites, one smart and obedient, for
example, and the other athletic and precocious; the opposition within a paired unit allows
children to identify themselves with one twin against the difference of the other” (119).
While the employment of twinship as a trope in entertainment has, of course, been
discussed throughout this dissertation, Dillon’s observations of twinship as a marketing
tool specifically for large children’s media and entertainment conglomerates, such as
Disney and Nickelodeon, explain why children are so enticed by twin characters,
especially when also considering Dillon’s ideas of twin characters’ value in alleviating
feelings of loneliness among singleton children. However, this experience of isolation
relief via identification with inseparable characters is ironic in conjunction with what
Dillon rightly identifies as an otherization of twins throughout children’s films and
television programs: “As we look at twins, either directly at an image or through the
figuration of language, we may recognize the self as a unique subject different from an
other” (119). Certainly, it is ironic that this sense of ostracization of twin characters—the
shot of a twinned pair sitting together, isolated from the other “normal” children, moving
in complete unison in bizarre contrast to their singleton counterparts, for instance—would
bring about feelings of belonging and connection when children associate themselves
with those othered twin characters. Analyses of similarly ironic reactions to the
grotesqueness and gore of the horror genre may offer an explanation for these paradoxical
reactions to twin depictions among adults as well. In his classic, foundational study of
horror films and culture, The Philosophy of Horror: Or, Paradoxes of the Heart (1990),
Noël Carroll examines the aesthetics, narrative structures, and reactions to the horror
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genre, contemplating “Why horror?” and “Why are horror audiences attracted by what,
typically (in everyday life), should (and would) repel them?” (159). Carroll dubs this
horror allure the “attraction-repulsion complex,” similar to sadomasochism, through
which audiences derive enjoyment from the revulsion that their consumption of horror
desirably evokes. In an extremely similar way, people of all ages, seem to be
simultaneously attracted to the notion of twinship, as evidenced by twins’
spectacularization and prevalence throughout media of nearly all genres and repulsed by
twins, as evidenced by this same spectacularization and their continual alienation from
ordinary singleton subjects, who consistently maintain residence in the limelight.
Especially given the habitual use of twins within the horror genre—perhaps, most
famously in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining—the use of horror film theory to describe
reactions to twins is reasonable. Carroll even mentions reactions to twins in The
Philosophy of Horror, in his discussion of the attraction-repulsion responses specifically
to depictions of monsters (160). In addition to highlighting the popular filmic and
televised treatment of twins as monstrous, viewing twinship through a lens comprised of
horror film theories also reveals the perpetual infantilization of twins, as twins (in all
genres, but particularly in the horror genre) are rarely portrayed as adults. The prevalence
of twin figures within children’s media due to this infantilization is one reason children
are a good microcosm for viewing global responses to twin characters from people of all
ages.
While the irony of our responses to representations of twinship may be especially
visible in children, it is important to recognize the ways in which we all, children and
adults alike, are susceptible to the affective dimension of film and its reflection, and
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inspiration, of our reality. An abundance of film theories underpins this notion of the
ability of film and television not only to mirror real life but to actually shape it. For
instance, film theorist Joel Black contemplates the real-world implications of the filming
of the last century in its entirety, from start to finish, asking, “What does it mean to refer
to [the twentieth century] as the filmed century?” (The Reality Effect 1). In drawing
attention to our existence within a continuously filmed world, Black demonstrates the
haziness of the divide between film and reality; our lives are so regularly recorded and
reflected on the screen that it is at times, perhaps, even difficult to recognize where the
reel ends and the real begins. And in The Reality of Film: Theories of Filmic Reality
(2011), film studies scholar Richard Rushton further smudges this reel-real boundary by
radically calling into question what constitutes our conceptualizations of reality. Taking
up philosopher Castoriadis’s challenge to reverse the approach of determining reality
based on its distinction from human imagination and creativity and to “begin with
humanity’s creative acts—dreams, poems, music—as a basis of ontological enquiry,”
Rushton uses the notion of “filmic reality” as a way of expressing not just film’s
representation of reality but how films shape our life experiences and our understandings
of those experiences (2). Film scholar Sarah Atkinson also coins the concept of “extended
cinema” in yet another examination of “the seamless merging of fiction into reality, and
emergent strategies of extended fictional practices which are played out within discourses
of reality and authenticity” (Beyond the Screen 21). These echoes of Dziga Vertov’s
classic kino-glaz (“film-eye”) theory
37
demonstrate the potential for filmic and televised
portrayals of twins across genres to shape the real-life treatment of twins in our
37
Vertov, Dziga. Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov. University of California Press, 1984.
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contemporary world and, thus, the need for analyzing those portrayals in any examination
related to twinship as a biological and social construction.
A focus on the ways twinship is displayed throughout film and television is also
particularly pertinent within critical and cultural media discourses that currently seem
hyperfocused on issues of representation. Within the last five years, seemingly every
major international company, from Apple and Coca-Cola to Amazon and ExxonMobil,
has broadcast advertisements centered on the themes of diversity and equity. If this recent
profusion of inclusive advertising has taught us anything, it is that appearing to care
about diverse representation is especially marketable. Disney’s eruption of live-action
movie remakes with racially diverse leads and casts, along with the circulation of the
viral hashtag #RepresentationMatters, especially evidences the value placed on this
appearance of care for the fair and accurate representation of all people. The Equality and
Human Rights Commission lists characteristics that are typically included within this call
for fair representation (e.g., race, sex, (dis)ability, etc.) as characteristics listed on birth
certificates.
38
My interest for this chapter regards a marker of identity also found on birth
certificates but not included as a protected category in current concerns for accurate
representation—birth multiplicity, specifically twinship. For this chapter, my goal is to
analyze the African and African American cinematic and televised representations of
twinship, acknowledging, like the previous chapters, how black creators make use of the
stereotypical in promoting depictions of racial, regional, and cultural hybridity, while also
considering with a deeper focus the impacts of this persistent presentation of twinship
stereotypes for real-life twins on the formations of their identities as twinned people.
38
https://www.equalityhumanrights.com/equality/equality-act-2010/protected-characteristics
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In the first and second chapters of this dissertation, I have argued that African
literature and African American literature are intimately entangled and that their shared
spirit as resistance texts lies in their ability to bend and break racial, regional, and cultural
categories traditionally considered fixed. Twinship, I argue, is a microcosm for this
resistance. By nature of their existence as a paradoxical binary in and of themselves (i.e.,
their representation as sameness and difference, oneness and doubleness), twins
illuminate the ways African and African American texts break binaries—namely, race,
region, and culture, among many others, such as gender and class—ironically, through
stereotypical subscriptions. These breakable binaries are, perhaps, especially taken up in
African diaspora texts because of the importance of those binary constructions to the
colonial structures that African diaspora texts so often expose and critique. In this
chapter, I would like to extend this perspective to also include twins’ representations in
twentieth- and twenty-first-century African and African American television and cinema.
Basic reasoning for this extension is that, as the forms of media that are, perhaps, most
accessible to global audiences, film and television contribute faces and concrete images
to our cultural imaginary surrounding twinship. On a more complex level, studying
cinematic representations of twinship may, in fact, make the (mis)handling of twins in
literary fiction much more obvious, as having an actual optic for twin caricatures may
literally illuminate truths that are difficult to envision upon reading alone. Additionally,
cinema and television may be most influential in real-world twins’ development of their
identities as twinned beings; therefore, studying this adherence to stereotypical twinship
depictions in film and television can also be a helpful window for viewing and
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understanding the real-life, tangible impacts of this repeated use of singular, often
spectacularized images of twinship.
For this cinematic analysis, I will again rely on my twin stereotypes classification
system to which I have subscribed in the previous chapters: a.) African spirits or those
whose twinship is clearly linked to African cosmologies; b.) The uncanny or twinship as
freakish, supernatural, or subnatural; and c) Strikingly dissimilar twinship in which the
twins often appear as photographic negatives of each other. While these classifications
are certainly helpful for identifying trends in the stereotypical treatment of twinship, and
while they might seem to offer a convenient structure for my readings of twinship,
because of the pervasiveness of these stereotypes, several of the texts I will examine in
this chapter could fall into more than one of these categories. Therefore, I will organize
my readings using the following categories: African films and television, African
American films and television, and children’s films and television from both Africa and
America. Ironically, structuring the remainder of this chapter along these designations, I
believe, will highlight their connections beyond continental and genre confines. Like
literature featuring twins, there is a countless abundance of films and television shows
featuring twin characters. While the list of movies and shows I will center here is
certainly not an exhaustive list, and this chapter offers merely a sampling of twins-
centered film and television, I will focus this analysis on many of the most popular
examples of twins in African and African American cinema and television in order to
demonstrate the continued use of the stereotypical among black creators of cinema and
television in order to paradoxically reflect culturally, racially, and regionally hybridized
identities and environments. In the remainder of this chapter, I will analyze the following
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texts: Nollywood films and series Twins of Fire (2020) and Love’s Lies (2023); African
American films and series Black-ish (2014-2022) and Euphoria (2019-2022); and
children’s films and series Sister, Sister (1994-1999), The Proud Family (2001-2005), and
Twitches (2005). These texts offer yet more illustrations of the continued rejection of
colonial binaries for race, region, and culture among African and African American texts,
in part, through the employment of stereotypical depictions of twinship, offering a
glimpse at a potential key to achieving future, concrete forms of colonial resistance—a
paradoxical reliance on stereotypical categorizations. And, as I will argue, this shared
achievement of colonial defiance through use of the stereotypical reveals an ironic spirit
of subversion that, I believe, is essential to the African roots of these texts—a shared
spirit that breaks racial, regional, and cultural stereotypes and exhibits the strength of
Africa’s and America’s ancestral connections despite an assumption that they are
hopelessly segregated by the history of enslavement.
These films’ and television shows’ abilities to exemplify the possibility of shared
cosmological roots across continental and genre boundaries is especially significant
considering recent real-world instances of cultural clashes that clearly demonstrate the
perception of an irreparable schism between African and African American lives. This
divide is easily visible in Jubilee Media’s production of its viral 2022 video titled “Did
Slavery Affect Your Family? Africans vs African Americans.” As a part of Jubilee’s
Middle Ground series, the video follows a typical Middle Ground format, placing
Africans in a group on one side of the screen and African Americans in another group on
the other side, with chairs placed in the middle of the floor, inviting debate between the
opposing sides. At the start of the video, a sequence of words rapidly flashes in the
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middle of the screen—“Poverty; American Dream; Slavery; Hip-Hop; Law Enforcement;
Race”—immediately highlighting some of the issues that most strongly split the two
groups ideologically (0:21-0:23). Following this introduction, an unseen interviewer
states the first debate topic, further emphasizing the division between the groups: “Step
forward if you agree. Slavery affected my family” (0:34-0:36). Jubilee’s initial discussion
firmly roots these visible tensions between Africans and African Americans in issues of
slavery, aligning with some scholarship centered on the modern African/African
American cultural binary.
39
Africana Studies researcher Tunde Adeleke also ultimately
credits slavery for this division in “Black Americans and Africa: A Critique of the Pan-
African and Identity Paradigms” (1998), wherein Adeleke expresses what is now the
predominant notion of the lasting impact of the Middle Passage on Africans and African
Americans. Adeleke writes of African Americans’ “deep cultural distance and alienation
from Africa—a consequence, no doubt, of the acculturation process in the New World”
(516). Adeleke refers to the continental and ideological distance between the groups as “a
critical cultural gulf . . . submerged beneath the veneer of Pan-Africanism, a gulf that has
only widened with the passing of time” (516). For Adeleke, this cultural “gulf” had
colonial beginnings, as early African Americans, having assimilated to notions of
Eurocentric imperialism, sought to distinguish themselves from Africans, who were
viewed as hailing from the “Dark Continent” of barbarity. Adeleke ends his argument
with a solemnly realistic note that, although organizations and individuals may still
39
There exists a plethora of scholarship that, like my work, overtly refutes this cultural binary between
Africa and America; however, in addition to Adeleke, there are also scholars who uphold this binary,
particularly as it relates to migrant returns to Africa. Oladele O. Arowolo, in “Return Migration and the
Problem of Reintegration” and Razak Jaha Imoro, Kaderi Noagah Bukari, and Richard Ametefe, in
“Experiences, Expectations, and Challenges of Return” contemplate the struggles of bridging historic,
colonial segregations, such as Africa and America.
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perpetuate Pan-African values, current adherence to traditional continental divides makes
the chance of a Pan-Africanist coexistence extremely unlikely. This long-standing view is
bolstered by sociologists, such as Phillip Gay, who claims that “The overwhelming
majority of black Americans are, at the very least, seven generations culturally removed
from Africa.” (“Commentary,” par. 5).
40
Views such as these have painted a rather bleak
picture of the potential for African and African American cultures and lives to find
reconciliation in their ancestral connections. I fundamentally disagree with this image of
defeatism. I believe that in their depictions of twin caricatures, twins-centered African
and African American texts—and, perhaps, films and television most strongly—ironically
exhibit a racial-stereotype-breaking spirit that is central to the African heritage of these
texts, demonstrating clear and undeniable ancestral connections between these “twinned”
cultures supposedly detached by the Middle Passage. In this way, this chapter’s focus on
cinematic twinship is a direct challenging of the power enslavement seems to be granted
in popular discourses surrounding current transatlantic relations, and it is a revisioning of
what has hitherto been portrayed as a lack of agency among black Africans and
Americans to overcome the social and cultural conventions established through slavery
and Jim Crow—a pessimistic perception that, I would argue, positions even
contemporary Africans and African Americans as de facto inferior citizens hopelessly
trapped within permanent colonial confines. Pivoting away from this popular perception,
this chapter aims to highlight cinema that reveals the artful strength and perseverance of
Afrocentrism even within white-washing social and cultural configurations designed to
eradicate it.
40
It is worth noting that Gay’s study was published in 1989, therefore increasing the generational degrees
of separation Gay notes.
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African Films and Television
As the genre with the least degrees of cultural and geographic separation from the
cosmologies that may very well have given birth to the global twins stereotypes I analyze
in this project, African films and television offer a rich selection of texts that contain
twins. The large amount of films and series centering twins also makes sense given the
inordinately large amount of natural twin births that occur on the continent, in Nigeria
more specifically. Recent studies estimate that forty out of every thousand births are
twins among the Yoruba, who can also be found in Benin, Ghana, and Togo (Omolori 3).
This rate, according to these studies, is assumed to be even higher due to undocumented
births in rural areas. Therefore, Nollywood films and series are particularly abundant in
twin characters. Here, it is important to note that Nollywood and Nigeria are not
synonymous, both because not all Nigerian films are Nollywood films and because
“Nollywood” also encompasses some films that exist beyond Nigeria’s borders. There are
separate film industries for northern Nigerian films made in Hausa and for Yoruba films;
however, because of stylistic and thematic overlaps, as well as directorial and actor
crossovers, films from the Yoruba industry are often considered Nollywood films, even
though they are acknowledged as emerging from separate industries officially (Haynes
xxiii-xxiv). While Yoruba and Hausa industries certainly have created a slew of twin
content in their own right, as one of the most high-yielding film industries in the world,
and certainly the largest African film industry with the most international traction,
Nollywood is unquestionably the film industry most worthy of representation in this
chapter. It should also be noted here that my attention to Nollywood films in this chapter
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is not to claim Nollywood as the quintessential African film industry without also
acknowledging its colonial roots, as the largely Igbo tradition of Nollywood filmmaking
so popular today expanded originally out of films either imported from Europe for the
colonial elite or colonial propaganda films created for African commoners. As Nollywood
film scholar Jonathan Haynes, author of Nollywood: The Creation of Nigerian Film
Genres, explains, “Africans were subjected to a second kind of film, besides the
commercial imports: the instructional and propaganda films created for African audiences
by British, French, and Belgian colonial film units, which were taken by mobile cinema
vans into villages and neighborhoods that had no other experience of movies” (3).
Although Haynes goes on to say that during the eruption of such colonial films, cinemas
became key centers of urban modernity, Haynes later explains that “Nigerian video film
culture has effectively become Nigeria’s film culture” and that “a generation was grown
up in a world saturated with video films but with little or no chance to see films made in
the period of celluloid production” (xxiv). This acknowledgment of the inclusion of video
film as a large part of current Nollywood culture is important given the specific
contemporary films I reference in this chapter—noncanonical, open-access video films.
As such, these films are virtually never centered in critical discourse and are even
occasionally given differing titles, depending on the video provider. Despite this lack of
scholarly attention, I believe these films, as opposed to older, celluloid productions, such
as Tade Ogidan’s Nollywood classic Dangerous Twins (2004), to be of special
significance to this chapter as representations of Nollywood films that have become the
current face of African cinema, particularly for intercontinental audiences. Throughout
my readings of these Nollywood films, I will pay heed to the ways this lack of critical
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attention and lack of residence on Eurocentric subscription-only streaming platforms may
create a false sense of these films as cheap in creativity or artistry. Rather, I recognize
these films as examples of an industry that serves as a symbol of Nigerian pride, “the
most visible dimension of the new buoyancy, projecting Nigeria’s self-image across the
African-continent and beyond” (Haynes xxviii). By focusing on this newer form of
accessible video films, I believe I am contributing a refreshing focus on Nigerian film
that offers contemporariness and attention to accessibility.
Twins of Fire
While there are countless numbers of Nollywood films featuring twin characters,
one of the most popular contemporary film series is Twins of Fire. While this series falls
squarely into the newer “video films” category, its clever adherence to single narratives
for twinship empowers it to convey to international audiences an embrace of racial,
cultural, and regional hybridized identities that embodies Nollywood. In this way, films
like Twins of Fire exhibit the forward-thinking, intellectual comparability of Nollywood
to any other big-budget entertainment industry. The film follows a traditional Nollywood
film narrative type. Haynes typifies Nollywood thematic categories as follows: “Money
ritual film,” or a film in which “occult practices become figure for social predation under
military rule”; “senior girls,’” or films about “independent career women hungry for
power, money, and sex”; and “family film,” or films “often about a marriage threatened
from within or without” (xxvi). Twins of Fire fits neatly into the latter “family film”
category. The series follows twin sisters Akunna and Asanna, who fall in love with the
same man. In this narrative, Asanna is the clear threat to Akunna’s marriage, as she plots
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aggressively to steal Akunna’s husband and, ultimately, her family. Through this basic
narrative, Twins of Fire deeply reflects Igbo culture. As Nollywood is generally
considered an Igbo industry (although, in reality, it encompasses a number of cultures),
the series is naturally most obviously reflective of Igbo culture. This Igbo influence is
visible, in part, in the series’ reflection of Igbo oral traditions. In “Power, Marginality and
Womanbeing in Igbo Oral Narratives,” Chukwuma Azuonye creates two categories into
which Igbo oral tradition falls: “auko-ala (tales of earth), defined as ‘tales of the order of
myths, legends, and personal narratives which are told as true accounts of past events’”
and akuo-ifo, “tales of the imaginary world . . . told for entertainment and instructive
purposes’” (qtd. in Egejuru 148). As an imagined cautionary tale about the dangers of
greed and jealousy, Twins of Fire easily falls into the akuo-ifo category. While obviously
not a clear-cut myth, and therefore not falling into the auko-ala category, Twins of Fire
isn’t completely without mythological references. Because of the narrative’s clear Igbo
heritage, it would seem logical to search for parallels between Twins of Fire and Igbo
twin mythologies. Among these parallels is the treatment of twins as evil. While only one
sister is evil in Twins of Fire, the series’ treatment of the evil twin as if she were, as
Achebe describes, “an offence on the land and must be destroyed” harkens back to a dark
historic tradition rooted in Igbo mythology—the treatment of twins as monstrous (Things
Fall Apart, 125). Additionally, the series’ treatment of Akunna and Asanna as complete
behavioral opposites—Asanna exhibiting envy and self-absorption and Akunna
displaying generosity and warm-heartedness—could be read, in some ways, as drawing
upon depictions of twins in Igbo cosmology. Akunna and Asanna could be interpreted as
a representation of the twin deity Chi na Eke, who represents counterbalancing forces and
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contrasting social roles (qtd. in Egejuru 148). While the twin deity is composed of equal
male and female forces, Akunna’s and Asanna’s completely contrasting characters make
the twins a potential reflection of this same twin-balance origins story. While I read Twins
of Fire as exhibiting some degrees of detachment that impact the narrative’s ability to
align with Igbo twin mythologies and cosmologies in every single respect, in each of
these potential parallels, the film series reflects twin stereotypes that, as we will see, give
the narrative intercontinental social and cultural comparability.
Out of the mythologies and cosmologies that are paralleled throughout the series
come basic stereotypes for twins that Twins of Fire promotes, particularly regarding its
twin protagonists’ existences as contradictions of one another. In the narrative’s theme of
the power of virtue and purity over selfishness and immodesty, the twin sisters reflect the
adversarial relationship twins are often assumed to possess due to stereotypes that
imagine twins as exact opposites. In the series, this reflection of twins’ power to harm
each other can be noted in the emotional pain sister Asanna causes her twin Akunna with
her reckless and promiscuous lifestyle, and this pain becomes extremely apparent in
Asanna’s eventual murder of Akunna in order to steal her husband. In these depictions of
the sisters, the twins are presented as complete and total opposites; Akunna is
characterized as the morally upstanding sister, who works hard and often sacrifices her
own needs and desires for the sake of her sister, and, contrarily, Asanna is depicted as the
selfish sister, who is irresponsible with her family’s money and reputation. The two are
also depicted as physical opposites, Akunna with dark skin and modest dress, often
without makeup or styled hair, and Asanna with lighter skin, revealing clothing, and often
heavy masks of makeup and lavish wigs. While the sisters swap aesthetic appearances
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throughout the series—Akunna marrying a rich suitor and becoming a smartly-dressed
woman, and Asanna becoming overtaken by the “stench of death” and being outcast from
her compound in wrinkled clothes, running mascara, and frizzy hair—the narrative, from
beginning to end, maintains a subscription to the notion of the sisters as negative-image
opposites both physically and morally. It is this stereotypical depiction of twinship as an
oppositional binary that informs my reading of the assumed oppositional twinship in
which African and African American texts have been situated.
Ironically, however, this portrayal of the twins’ adversarial relationship is
accompanied by a contradictory sense of their twin bond as unbreakable—also a twin
stereotype perpetuated throughout, for example, the Yoruba culture.
41
In Twins of Fire’s
first scene featuring both twins characters, Asanna seeks protection from her sister as she
runs away from two men who plan to attack her because she owes them money. Asanna
hides behind her sister, who shields her from the attackers, saying “If I do not protect my
sister, who else should I protect?” (Season 1, 8:41-8:43). The sisters are also often
portrayed as stereotypically spiritually and psychically linked, despite their quarrels.
Soon after Asanna expresses her love for Akunna’s fiancé, Akunna tells her sister, “I see
you visit all the old memories. I can feel it right here in my heart, but I want you to know
that I’m deeply sorry . . . because what we share no one does with us, not anywhere in the
world, not today, not anytime in the future, the bond we have between us is too strong for
a third party to break” (Season 1, 31:20-32:07). This expression of the sisters’ twin bond
is just one of many references to a connection between the twins that is stronger than
biology. Akunna also often refers to Asanna as “[her] better half” and “blood sister.” In
41
Here, I am specifically alluding to Yoruba mythology surrounding Taiwo and Kehinde, whom I have
referenced throughout this project.
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these portrayals of the sisters as inseparably, psychically close alongside the series’ clear
depictions of the sisters’ distance with regard to character and lifestyle, Twins of Fire
conforms to stereotypes regarding twins’ emotional inseparability and caricatures of
twins as completely opposites; paradoxically, at the same time, the twins demonstrate
strict binaries that categorize twins as either indivisibly attached or antithetical to the
extent of utter relational detachment. To this end, the twin protagonists’ complex
relationship reflects the cultural and regional binary rejections that the entire series
communicates.
These moments of the sisters’ simultaneous spiritual closeness and emotional
distance accompany several messages about themes that the series seems to suggest, like
the sisters’ relationship, cannot be split neatly into polarizing binaries. One such theme is
morality. Even the narrative’s undoubtable villain, Asanna, is not completely without
redeeming qualities, as the final seasons of the series present the murderous sister as
guilt-ridden and unavailingly suicidal over her heinous actions, writing in a suicide note,
“With tears in my heart I write. I write because the burden is so heavy on me. I have
offended both heaven and earth. . . . I wish to apologize to you, Greg, and anyone whom
I have hurt as I travel to the world beyond” (Season 9, 17:51-18:29). Even if Asanna’s
guilt does not absolve her of her egregious behavior, it at least demonstrates her
possession of a moral compass outside of the presence of her morally righteous twin
sister, who also appears to Asanna several times in premonitions after her death.
Akunna’s and Asanna’s interactions even beyond the grave demonstrate another theme of
the series—the obscurity and impermanence of life and death. This theme is also easily
visible in the final season’s surprise reappearance of Akunna’s son, Kamsi, after he is
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presumably killed by a car upon running away from Asanna’s abuse. In addition to
presenting the indeterminacy of life and death, the series also blurs the divide between
tradition and modernity, as the sisters move freely between the city and their compound.
Akunna marries a rich man, moves to the city, and returns to the compound with a flashy
car, offering to build her grandmother a renovated house. Asanna, on the other hand, has
many sexual affairs in the city and returns to the compound “raising [her] shoulders,
moving up and down, performing ‘city girl’ for [the compound]. Obvious, like a queen.”
(Season 1, 13:09-1919). In these ways, the series presents a dual depiction of the city as
both a land of prosperity and a haven for immorality, therefore rejecting strict narratives
of urban modernity as altogether “good” or “bad.” In each of these examples of the
show’s demonstrations of permeable conceptual cultural and regional borders that are
typically perceived with firm binaries, Twins of Fire repeatedly exemplifies its ultimate
boundary-breaking essence—a spirit that seems to emanate from Nollywood in general.
In this presentation of such complexities that are continually brought to light, ironically,
by Akunna’s and Asanna’s stereotypical differences, the series is empowered to break
cultural and regional stereotypes, particularly related to Africa and the Nollywood
industry. In its blurring of the lines between life and death, for instance, the series
promotes understandings of spirituality and life cycles that lie outside of Westernized or
European conceptualizations of life and death as a fixed, impermeable binary. In another
rejection of strict Eurocentric binaries, the series also obscures the divide between good
and evil, subverting colonial narratives that have historically relied on crystal-clear
illustrations of morality that depict colonial subjects as primitive or barbaric. In a similar
vein, the series also unsettles the split between African tradition and colonial modernity,
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illustrating both the contemporary advantages and the gentrifying disadvantages of the
city as compared to the modest, community-centered compound. Ultimately, as these
complexities are revealed through subscriptions to stereotypical representations of
twinship, Twins of Fire is empowered to communicate, to African and intercontinental
audiences alike, the intricate, innovative contemplations that characterize the industry of
Nollywood—a progressiveness surpassing, or at the very least comparable to, any big-
budget film industry.
Love’s Lies
Following the same video-film format, Nollywood’s Love’s Lies, the feature film,
communicates many of the same stereotypes and themes as Twins of Fire, the series. A
story about two families thrown into disarray as they are surprised to learn about their
children’s biological twinship, this film, like Twins of Fire, falls into Haynes’ “family
film” category (xxvi). The film’s central twin sister characters, teenagers Avery and Iris,
were separated at birth and meet in a shopping mall. (Surprisingly, this is not the only
shopping mall twin discovery to be discussed in this chapter.) In the film, the twins
believe they are merely doppelgängers until it is revealed that Avery was stolen from her
biological family and placed with a mother whose baby had died during delivery. Similar
to Twins of Fire’s cosmological echoes of the psychic and spiritual bond of twinship,
even before the girls discover their twinship, they are depicted as having a near-
paranormal connection. After their chance encounter, both girls consistently ask about the
other, Avery believing Iris is her look-alike and Iris believing Avery is the ghost of her
twin sister Isabel. Avery’s frequent inquiries about doppelgängers are treated as especially
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probing and incessant for her mother Cara, who has formed a romantic relationship with
Iris’s father Lucas. Upon the parents’ first date, the daughters meet, and this inseparable
attachment between the two grows exponentially, especially after Cara learns the truth of
Avery’s birth and forbids her from seeing Iris for fear that Lucas will take Avery from her.
In these perpetuations of the stereotype of twins’ emotional inseparability, Love’s Lies,
like Twins of Fire, naturally reflects Igbo cosmologies related to the indivisible natural
balance of life.
42
Additionally, as films and references pertinent to the Yoruba culture are
regularly included in Nollywood films, the sisters’ inextricable bond could also echo
Yoruba mythology regarding twin loss, both Iris’s sacred treatment of her supposedly
dead sister and Avery’s obsession over Iris, particularly after she is forbidden from seeing
Iris, mirroring Yoruba mythological notions of twins as interconnected beings whose soul
is shared despite physical and even mortal separation.
43
This conventional treatment of
twinship as an inseverable connection sets up Love’s Lies’ narrative to ultimately reflect
empowering social and cultural binary breakages, as we will observe.
Despite these depictions of Avery’s and Iris’s twin bond and the sisters’ physical
identicalness, the twins are also portrayed as stereotypically opposite in personality,
behavior, and personal style. For instance, after Cara’s first encounter with Lucas, the
outgoing and sociable Avery excitedly asks her mother a series of unwelcomed questions,
saying, “I’m your child, so I’m supposed to know everything that’s going on in your life”
(21:45-21:49). Juxtaposing Avery’s enthusiasm, the very next scene features Iris’s distant
conversation with Lucas. In this scene, Iris says to her father, “The highlight of your day
42
Here, I am alluding specifically to the Igbo “Supreme Being” Chineke, as a contraction, meaning both
“soul” and “division,” and representing both male and female (Ezeugwu et al., “The Supreme Being”).
43
See Oruene’s “The Cult of the Ibeji as Reflected in the Oriki Ibeji,” to which I have alluded throughout
this dissertation.
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is not entertaining, and listening to it actually itches my ears” (23:47-23:54), exhibiting
the sisters’ version of twinship as a stereotypical oppositional binary. The sisters’
contrasting personalities and behaviors are also accompanied by differences in style. A
flashback scene to the sisters’ first official meeting, during Lucas’s and Cara’s date,
especially exemplifies their converse clothing and hairstyle choices. In the scene, the
sisters sit together, on opposite sides of a couch, Avery wearing a white dress with black
leopard spots, two braids draping her forehead, and Iris wearing a white dress with black
stripes, two braids tied at the back of her head (47:03-48:17). The twins’ obvious
differences in style in this scene, accompanied by their differences in personality, also
echo Nollywood’s Igbo tradition, reflecting Igbo cosmologies situating twins as opposites
parts of a whole diety.
44
Thus, this use of the trope of twinship as an oppositional binary
(either consciously or unconsciously) repeats mythological treatments of twinship,
exhibiting, again, how the stereotypical handling of twins as opposites is rooted in
African mythologies that connect this work to the African American texts I will analyze.
Avery’s and Iris’s fashion and personality contradictions, of course, coincide with the
sisters’ physical and emotional closeness, reflecting the many themes that, like the sisters,
are not so easily categorized.
Just as the sisters cannot be classified, as a whole, as simply polar opposites or
completely identical, the movie’s communication of the concepts of life and death, good
and evil, and family are all depicted as gray areas. Like Twins of Fire, Love’s Lies
communicates the obscurity of life and death through the appearances of characters who
were assumed to be dead; in this case, Iris first assumes Avery is a reincarnation or ghost
44
See Ezeugwu and Chinweuba’s “The Supreme Being in Igbo Thought: A Reappraisal.”
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of her twin sister Isabel. In addition to the film’s presentation of Avery as a representation
of the dead, Avery is also presented as a replacement for the dead, not only in her
replacement of Iris’s presumed dead twin but in her replacement of the baby and husband
her mother lost. Avery is given to Cara as a secret replacement for her stillborn daughter
shortly after Cara’s loss of her husband Obed. In this use of the living to represent and
replace the dead, the film promotes the image of permeable borders for life and death,
paralleling Twins of Fire. The film also illustrates flexible, indefinite images of good and
evil, as the “evil” force of the story—the separation of the twin sisters—is enacted out of
love. In her admission of guilt in committing the act of separating Avery and Iris, Cara’s
best friend, who was also her midwife, says to Cara, “[A]fter the death of Obed, you were
beginning to act weird. Things weren’t going well with you my friend. I lost you at some
point . . . [T]hat pregnancy was the only thing you were living for. . . .Cara, I did it for
you, my friend. I had no choice. I was beginning to lose you” (1:12:49-1:14:11). Rather
than presenting Iris’s and Avery’s separation as a clear-cut morally good or bad decision,
the film presents the objectively illegal act of kidnapping as a moral dilemma, an
impossible choice between accepting a loved one’s painful fate and stripping away a
stranger’s joy in order to alleviate that pain. As in Twins of Fire, Avery’s and Iris’s ironic
dichotomy as spiritually connected sisters with evident physical similarities and clear
personality and style differences emphasizes these incongruous truths communicated
throughout the film; neither death and life nor good and evil are presented as mutually
exclusive. Therefore, even beyond rejecting cultural and regional binaries typically
posited as stringent and unmergeable, the film interrogates the additional supposedly
fixed constructions of death and life and morality, specifically through stereotypical
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presentations of twinship. Therefore, Avery’s and Iris’ twinship offers a window into the
paradoxical nature of subversion of binaries in African diaspora texts. Through
potentially harmful subscriptions to single narratives for twins, the film reveals rejections
of single narratives regarding culture, mortality, and morality, among other concepts. In
revealing these complexities, the film interrogates these conceptions as fixed
constructions, which, ultimately conveys the intellectual nature and artistry of the film,
again enabling it to speak of both its conceptual innovativeness and its social and cultural
significance to both African and global audiences.
Additionally, in embracing the video film format, not only are both Twins of Fire
and Love’s Lies adding to global cinemas a novel, virtually accessible African cinematic
voice; they are also disrupting the profit-making potential of the old Nollywood celluloid
film market, evading the intellectual and artistic confines of a traditional money-focused
business rooted in a colonial history. In this way, Twins of Fire and Love’s Lie’s
themselves serve as the emblems of the subversion of colonial binaries designating strict
races, regions, and cultures. Through their nature as video films, they conform to the
characteristics of film-making often discounted as cut-rate and intellectually lowbrow.
Within this alignment with such non-canonical video texts, both the film and series are a
form of colonial resistance, transcending the regional, cultural, and racial borders that
may have become implicitly constructed around Nollywood’s canonical texts, with their
colonial histories as hubs for the reinforcement of colonial modernity.
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African American Films and Television
Black-ish
Kenya Barris’s sitcom Black-ish uses twins in conjunction with its comical
depictions of an upper-middle class black American family’s everyday challenges related
to their racial and cultural integration within their Los Angeles work and residential
communities. As a major prime-time American sitcom, Black-ish has garnered its fair
share of attention among academics particularly regarding its commentary on this racial
and cultural integration. Interestingly, quite a few use Black-ish in scientific and
psychological studies, such as Jas M. Sullivan and Gheni N. Platenburg, who, in their
study “From Black-ish to Blackness: An Analysis of Black Information Sources’
Influence on Black Identity Development,” reference Black-ish in examining the
connections between the intake of what they call “Black information” and individuals’
racial identities. Similarly, in “What does it mean to be Black-ish?: A Grounded Theory
Exploration of Colorism on Twitter,” Skyla Parker explores discourse surrounding
colorism on Twitter specifically among Black-ish audience members immediately after
viewing an episode of the show. Other scholars make more overt references to Black-ish’s
racial and cultural messages in analyses of the show through critical theoretical lenses.
For instances, in Judy L. Isaksen’s chapter “Relishing the Contradictions: The
Intentionality of Black-ish,” Judy L. Isaken analyzes Black-ish’s portrayals of “confusion,
disruption, and reconciliation” through queer theory, arguing that the show demonstrates
an “intentionality to boldly address markers of social identity—namely, race, class,
gender, and sexuality as they intersect within our society’s hierarchy of dominance” (39).
While I would argue that Black-ish much more explicitly and forcefully conveys
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messages related to race and culture than messages pertaining to gender or sexuality, I
align with Isaken’s view of Black-ish’s presentation of the racial and cultural intersections
with, and disruptions of, social hierarchies. Gretta Blackwell also aligns with this specific
focus on race and class in “The Productive Possibilities of black-ish: An ‘Honest’ View of
Black Middle Classness in the Domestic Sitcom.” Blackwell argues that Black-ish is a
successful producer of honesty and that this honesty is produced specifically through “a
willingness to explore how it feels to negotiate persistent friction between one’s racial
and class positionality” (329). And in “Examining Racial Taboo through X-phemism in
the TV Show Black-ish,” Raquel Sánchez Ruiz and Isabel López Cirugeda argue that
within its use of polarizing, exaggerated comedy, Black-ish is able to cross social lines
related to acceptable behaviors and language. In Ruiz’s and Cirugeda’s attention to the
irony of using isolating comedy for the sake of crossing lines that ultimately bring
audiences together is not unlike my attention to the paradox of Black-ish’s stereotypical
use of twinship for the sake of arriving at very un-stereotypical, innovative messages
regarding race and culture. While all of these scholars, in one way or another, discuss this
progressive messaging surrounding the racial and cultural binaries that the series depicts
as flexible, no one seems to have found the show’s use of twinship to be a key reflection
of this flexibility.
The twinship between the two youngest children is portrayed with several
stereotypes connected to the depictions of twinship seen in racial, cultural, and regional
binary-breaking African cinema. These linkages even begin with the twins’ names. In
Black-ish, the brother-sister twins are named Jack and Diane. This reference to
Mellencamp’s popular fictive pair seems to immediately fix the twins into the roles of
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playful figures, similar to pets with kitsch, pop-culture-inspired names. Jack and Diane
are also stereotypically portrayed as opposites; in addition to their boy-girl binary, the
siblings are depicted as antithetical in behaviors and personalities, Diane possessing
independence, confidence, and intelligence beyond her years, and Jack possessing a
youthful spirit and comedic demeanor. These differences are also reflected in the
aesthetics of the twins’ shared bedroom, wallpaper split down the middle of the wall,
Jack’s side of the room adorned with green and blue patterns, and Diane’s side with pink
and orange patterns. As in the African videos examined above, these personality and
aesthetic differences exhibit the twins as an antithetical pairing. The oppositional
stereotypes with which the twins are presented are also especially visible in episodes
specifically centering the twins. For instance, in the Season Two’s episode
“Twindependence,” Jack and Diane grow tired of their perpetual treatment as
permanently inseparable and request to be separated, to be regarded as separate siblings
as opposed to twins. The episode begins with a montage of celebrity and stock photos and
videos of twins set to the musical backdrop of the twin duo Nelson’s “(Can’t Live
without Your) Love and Affection.” As in nearly all Black-ish episodes, the family
patriarch, Dre, narrates this opening scene, saying, “Twins. Nature’s weirdos. Certain
cultures kill them immediately. And I get that. They’re a lot of work” (00:04-00:12). In
this clear reference to twin killings, from the Igbo, Efik, and other groups globally, the
episode clearly communicates an Africa-reflective image of twins as freakish, a
stereotype further driven home by a following shot of Jack and Diane in matching blue
suits standing in of a hallway, clearly mimicking the classic image of twin sisters in The
Shining, as Dre says, “They even haunt hotels together” (00:29-00:32). Despite the
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siblings’ personality differences, it is interesting that in moments meant to highlight their
peculiarity as twins, they are still presented as, in at least physical appearance, an eerily
identical boy-girl pair. The show reflects twins’ often-felt, real-life frustrations with this
social typecasting, as Diane tells her mother, “I’m tired of being ‘Jack and Diane.’ Now,
I’m just ready to be ‘and Diane,’” demonstrating the performativity of their twinship as a
social construction (00:50-00:54). In spite of this initial longing for separation, Black-ish
portrays their twinship as an unbreakable spiritual bond, as, throughout the episode, Jack
and Diane independently come to appreciate their twinship, the final scene featuring the
twins demonstrating their inseparability, as Jack is invited back into their shared
bedroom, leaps into their beds pushed together, and excitedly tells Diane about his day,
Diane listening intently (19:13-19:32). In this portrayal of the twins’ reunification, this
image of twinship is unique compared to others I analyze in this chapter; the siblings are
depicted with a complexity that refuses to define their twinship as either a purely
biological structure or a performative construction, exhibiting an agency that
interestingly, and paradoxically, projects stereotypes for twins at the same time as it
rejects the strict classification of twinship as a construct. This complexity is reflective of
the racial and cultural hybridity that the show illuminates as well.
The reliance on single narratives of twinship in the presentation of the twins’
similarities, differences, and paranormal twin bond—reflected most evidently in this
aforementioned final scene with the twins lying on their beds pressed together as one,
straddling the split between the bedroom’s boy-girl color scheme—replicates twins’
highlighting of thematic paradoxes visible in African cinema. In Black-ish, divisions
related to race and culture are depicted with a sense of humorous indistinctness. The
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show takes place in Los Angeles, and the story revolves around an affluent black family,
who navigates life as racial minorities within their mostly white upper-middle social
class, the matriarch, Rainbow working as a doctor and Dre working as an advertising
executive. In these moments of racial and social merging, the show communicates racial
and social divisions as breakable constructs, the hilarity of the show dependent, in part,
on the sometimes-awkward balancing act of embracing one’s black identity within
traditionally whitewashed social spaces. In one episode that especially exemplifies this
blurring of racial and social lines, entitled “Switch Hitting,” Dre navigates the challenges
of working in a majority-white advertising agency, as a white executive challenges his
authenticity as a black man. As the episode begins, Dre’s traditional opening monologue
references Dre’s code-switching in his work life: “It’s been said black people have a
double-consciousness. We have our mainstream selves to be in the man’s world, and we
have our downhome selves for the brothers” (0:00-0:21). This narration is accompanied
by an image of Dre staring into a mirror, wearing a basketball jersey and a gold chain,
with a pitbull sitting at his feet. This obvious caricature of urban, modern-day blackness
gestures towards the challenges Dre will face in the episode related to his sense of
security in his own blackness. As Dre is shown entering his workplace and greeting his
colleagues, the narration continues: “As a black man in corporate America, my days are
spent with a series of awkward handshakes. . . .But every once in a while, something
happens that rattles me—the awkward one ends up being me” (1:04-1:26). Demonstrating
the challenges of the blurring of racial and social lines in Dre’s work environment, the
episode depicts Dre’s internal conflict as his blackness is called into question after he is
passed over for a chance to collaborate with an urban marketing account. Dre’s inner
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racial turmoil is sparked, in part, by a white executive’s appropriation of African
American English:
Y’all don’t know me, but I don’t play none of this Hollywood “ra ra ra” ish. Okay,
but when I heard your urban division was the truth, I had to come check y’all out.
The bottom line is, we want black folks to start feeling us more, ya feel me? So
tell me why I should start getting down with you guys and help us start getting felt
(2:18-2:32).
Even if this specific example is a particularly offensive one, and although the episode
concludes with Dre’s eventual security that his blackness, even amidst a sea of white
coworkers, needs no qualification, this moment of crossed racial lines, among several that
occur in this episode and throughout the series, represents an unsettling of racial
boundaries that the series perpetually promotes through the integration of the family into
predominantly white work and school environments. Through this persistent exhibition of
racial hybridity, even presenting racial borders as permeable, Black-ish demonstrates a
flexibility surrounding race, among any other markers of identity, that form the basic
landscape of the show. In this moment, among countless others that demonstrate the
show’s presentations of racial and cultural hybridity, Jack’s and Diane’s twinship plays an
integral role in the bridging of each of these racial and cultural binaries. In their
stereotypical depictions as polar opposite siblings who are inseparably attached, Jack and
Diane reflect the interweaving of both sides of racial and cultural binary constructs that
the show paints with permeable borders. To this end, Jack and Diane are an echo of the
power of colonial resistance such blending ultimately grants the show. The hilarity that
ensues upon the racial and cultural mixing does not diminish the impact of Black-ish’s
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social and political commentary; it, in fact, enables it. Over the course of the show’s eight
seasons, Black-ish tackled major American social issues, from colorism and blue-on-
black violence to COVID-19 and sexuality.
45
Ultimately, in its evening time slots on
ABC, the show presented a fresh view of America, and its racial and sociocultural issues,
to a prime-time audience accustomed to viewing such issues through the perspectives of
white characters and experiences. In this way, the show also demonstrates the bridgeable
binary between comedy and impactful social commentary, presenting within a
predominantly white-washed sitcom world the struggles that even well-off black families
face in a society, and world, filled with systemic prejudice. In their portrayal as an
oppositional binary, Jack and Diane reflect this duality that rejects the show’s segregation
from other white mainstream entertainment.
Euphoria
Similar to Lovecraft Country’s treatment of twinship as an eerie, or downright
terrifying, trope,
46
Sam Levinson’s HBO series Euphoria presents its twins as a
forgettable teenaged pair to be whipped out from hiding in scarce, opportune moments.
47
Even in critical discourse surrounding the series, from my observations, the twins are
hardly, if ever, mentioned at all. There are a good many scholars who regard the series as
a groundbreaking achievement of cultural boundary breakages, the most significant of
which, for many writers, seems to be the shows communication of ideas related to trans
45
Notable episodes include Season 2’s “Hope,” Season 5’s “Black Like Us,” and Season 7’s “Hero Pizza.”
46
In the third chapter of this project, I will describe HBO’s Lovecraft Country’s presentation of Topsy and
Bopsy.
47
It is worth noting that in my personal conversations with Euphoria enthusiasts, rarely does anyone
remember that the twin characters exist, despite their frequent appearances throughout the series.
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identities. For instance, arguing that Euphoria disrupts conventional television traditions
of immediately associating trans characters with tragedy, P. Macintosh writes, “Euphoria
signals a new era in trans representation, one that is defined by a ‘cool’ ‘trans aesthetic”
and that through the show’s primary trans character Jules, Euphoria “appears less
interested in debates about the perceived authenticity of trans identities than in employing
transness as a marker of transgressive youth culture” (“Transgressive TV”). Likewise, in
“Running at Cisnormative Walls: Transgender Character in The Danish Girl, Orange is
the New Black, and Euphoria,” Kat Newman argues that through this view of trans
identity that rejects stereotypical iterations of trans tragedy, Euphoria “signals a shift
away from the cisnormative account of transgender experiences, and gestures towards a
normative transgender gaze. (107). Contrastingly, however, in “Beyond the ‘Trans Fact,’?
Trans Representation in the Teen Series Euphoria: A Complexity, Recognition, and
Comfort,” Masanet, Ventura, and Ballesté imply that Euphoria may still adhere to
stereotypical representations of transness, even as it presents a less melodramatic version
of it. In addition to analyzing the series’ normative images of trans identities—images
that these authors strongly associate with Gen-Z culture—scholars, such as Kaufman,
Bazell, Callaco, and Sedoc also study Euphoria’s messaging surrounding drug abuse and
mental illness amidst the characters’ social and racial mingling by analyzing audience’s
Reddit reactions to the show (“This Show Hits,” 2021). And in “Unfeeling the Future”:
Euphoria, Teen Angst, and the Micro-dystopic,” Anders Lysne argues that in Euphoria’s
social, racial, and cultural commentary, the show conveys issues pertinent to Gen Z’s
“age of anxiety, in which dystopia has migrated the ‘bad place’ of its Greek etymology to
become a free-floating, all-encompassing, and inescapable sense of bad. One that, like the
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anxiety, panic, and depression conveyed by Rue in Euphoria’s opening sequence, is as
strongly felt as it is numbing and obscure in its direction” (82). Despite their lack of
mention in this variety of critical discussions, in their stereotypical representation of
duality and similitude, Euphoria’s twin figures are impactful contributors to the show’s
Gen-Z-specific, hybridized presentations of race and youth culture, reflecting the ultimate
depiction of racial and cultural flexibility we have observed among African and African
American cinema/television alike.
The name rhyming of Euphoria’s twins, Roy and Troy McKay, immediately
signals the siblings’ uncanny similarities. Euphoria accentuates Roy’s and Troy’s obvious
identicalness from the twins’ very first scene in the pilot episode. Roy and Troy first
appear at a party hosted by their older brother, entering with identical swaggers, dressed
in matching tank tops. (“Pilot,” 0:18-0:21) Throughout the progression of the scene, as
the music gets louder and the room fills with people and smoke, Roy and Troy move in
unison as they greet friends and take simultaneous hits from identical vape pens, even
their puffs of smoke floating with an air of similitude (0:57-1:00). The twins’ uncanny,
somewhat creepy presence in the scene, which features heavy amounts of drinking and
smoking, contributes to the scene’s overall psychotropic mood, perhaps, mimicking the
hallucinatory effects of drugs. In addition to the show’s depiction of the twins’ identical
appearances and behaviors, Euphoria portrays Roy and Troy as completely exchangeable,
their separate personalities completely unimportant to the narrative or the characters
within the narrative. For example, in a particularly dramatic encounter during a
Halloween party, the show’s narrator and central character Rue confronts Troy about
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his/Roy’s relationship with her sister Gia.
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During the party, in a scene that somewhat
resembles a police interrogation, Rue threateningly stands over Troy, who is sitting in a
chair, and she calls him “Roy.” When Troy clarifies his identity, Rue responds, saying
“Roy, Troy. I don’t give a fuck” (16:24-16:27). The lack of attention Rue pays to ensuring
she is speaking with the correct twin in this conversation specifically containing the
threat of bodily harm with a pair of pliers and a blowtorch especially indicates the extent
to which the brothers are completely disregarded as individuals, considered one and the
same, and also disposable. The eeriness of Roy’s and Troy’s inseparability and
interchangeability also outcasts the twins. Their rejection as freakish because of their
twinship can also be seen in their very first scene of the series; as they enter their
brother’s party, their brother attempts to shun them from the room, saying, “Yo, what are
y’all even doing out the room, man? Go back upstairs, bro. Thing One and Thing Two”
(0:18-0:24). Later in the scene, the twins are also even treated as sexual outcasts, as their
brother tells them to “Shut [their] little virgin asses up” (0:27-0:29), also reflecting a
stereotypical view of twins as constantly infantilized.
Euphoria’s stereotypical presentation of an innate, rigid binary between the
twinned and non-twinned, treating Roy and Troy as doubled freaks often shunned from
the rest of the characters,
49
is interesting given all of the incongruous intersections that
48
Several Reddit pages express confusion regarding which twin dates Gia, evidencing Roy’s and Troy’s
indistinguishable and interchangeable characters in the show; Roy and Troy move and behave so
indistinctly that it is nearly impossible for even the keenest of viewers to know the difference.
https://www.reddit.com/r/euphoria/comments/l93jhp/i_apologize_if_this_is_a_stupid_question_but_i/
49
Throughout the series, this treatment of Roy and Troy as eerie doubles and social outcasts clearly brings
to mind the historic, mythology-rooted superstitions surrounding twinship and the shunning (and even
killing) of twins from some West African ethnic groups, such as the Efik and Igbo. Because there do not
appear to be many direct references to West Africa, or even the show’s global history as originating in
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occur throughout the show. For example, the show centers a group of high school
students, using the kids’ school as a common setting. The public school’s nature as a
space that brings together multitudes of people of various races, ethnicities, personalities,
financial backgrounds, belief systems, etc., creates an inherently binary-breaking aspect
to the show, as it depicts students socially merging in unexpected, non-prescriptive
ways—the archetypical popular jock depicted as a raging sociopath; the heavy-set, self-
conscious girl portrayed as one of the most popular students in school; among several
other complex characterizations. Interestingly, irrespective of these undesirable qualities
which would normally render these characters’ social rejects, the characters are allowed
acceptance, and even popularity, among their peers, demonstrating the show’s flexible
treatment of stereotypical high school relations. Euphoria also paints its individual
characters with this same disregard for social and racial borders separating supposedly
incompatible characteristics. For instance, one of the show’s primary characters, Rue,
along with her sister Gia, is biracial, and several characters within the show engage in
interracial romantic relationships. Within these binary breakages, Euphoria illustrates a
rejection of strict categories for race and culture, among other constructions typically
imagined with conventional binaries. I believe the presence of twinship—even as
unremarkable, or even unnoticed, as it often seems—to be an important contributor to
this binary rejection. In their caricatured identicalness, Roy and Troy are a paradox. They
are a part of the cast but are often not visible characters, even shunned from some scenes
because of their twinship. Even when the brothers are on screen, they are two characters
Israel, there is no reason to assume these mythological parallels are intentional. My contention, in fact, is
that the African influences on Euphoria, along with the other African American films and series I examine
in this chapter, may be so ubiquitous that they often go unnamed and unnoticed.
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but are most often treated as one. Within the eerie-twin/‘normal”-singleton juxtaposition
that this stereotyping creates, however, Roy and Troy are useful as a trope that, through
contrast, casts light on the ways that all other characters are free from cliché, one-
dimensional depictions based on unrealistic, impenetrable designations for all markers of
their identities. Ultimately, Euphoria’s social intermingling of characters with such vast
cultural and racial differences empowers the series to communicate youthful, realistic
messages about futurist anxieties that create what Lysne calls a “teens-in-crisis horror
show” for all members of the “Zoomer” generation, regardless of those racial or cultural
divisions (“Unfeeling the Future,” 90). In this way, Roy and Troy, as a single analytical
subject, are helpful as yet another example of how black texts
50
work through paradoxes
to defy the conceptual rigidity of notions of race and culture, along with other markers of
identity highlighted in this series, such as sex and gender. In Roy’s and Troy’s
stereotypical treatment as completely identical copies of each other, Euphoria offers the
image of twinship in juxtaposition to the other singleton characters who, unlike Roy and
Troy, are given complex, individualistic identities that create the racially and culturally
hybridized social environment central to the show. This use of twinship as a foil for the
rest of “normal,” singleton society is a shared tradition across both African and African
American cultures, once again invalidating the notion of those cultures as an oppositional
binary.
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Of all the series listed in this chapter, Euphoria most raises interesting questions regarding what is or
should be considered “black” television. While the protagonist and a good portion of the main characters
are black, the show’s racially diverse ensemble of cast members, along with the series’ white creator, brings
the accuracy and ethics of this label into question.
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Children’s Films and Television
Sister, Sister
Especially given the prevalence of twinship depictions throughout children’s
entertainment, programming geared towards children is a valuable optic for viewing the
perpetuation and impacts of twinship as a trope in African American film and television.
On the cusp of children’s and adult television is ABC’s Sister, Sister, a show about twin
sisters—Tia Landry and Tamera Campbell—who, like the twin sisters in Nollywood’s
Love’s Lies, discover their twinship at a shopping mall. Perhaps unlike many other twins
representations in films and series covered in this chapter, the twinship in Sister, Sister
has garnered a fairly large amount of critical attention, largely focused on sociological
analyses of the show’s presentation of its protagonists’ family structure. Intriguingly, a
large amount of scholarship that references the show does so in a way that insincerely
engages with the show itself, rather, alluding to isolated lines, characters, or plotlines
from the show in studies that have little to do with the series. For instance, in their
chapter “Sister, Sister, Never Knew How Much I Missed Ya!” Catherine Ma and Keisha
V. Thompson invoke Sister, Sister’s theme song in reflecting on their separate experiences
as first-generation immigrants and college graduates hired in the same academic
department. In this popular commodification of the series within unrelated scholarship,
Sister, Sister already demonstrates the ways its twin figures are routinely employed as
stereotypical figures of duality and perpendicularity. Another scholarly trend is analyzing
or referencing the series for its modernized depictions of family structures and roles for
men and women. For example, in “American Family TV Sitcoms The Early Years to the
Present: Father, Mothers, and Children—Shifting Focus and Authority,” Valerie A.
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Reimers references Sister, Sister in her analysis of series—particularly series featuring
racial minority families— that have shifted away from nuclear family structures and
domestic roles for women. Likewise, in “TGIF: Thank Goodness It’s Family: Family
Messages in ABC’s 1990’s Friday Night Lineup,” Kourtney Hanna Smith analyzes the
sitcom, alongside other ABC series such as Full House and Step-by-Step, in this analysis
of the reconstruction of family values outside of nuclear family structures. These studies,
and others, highlighting Sister, Sister’s construction of its unconventional family unit
point to the crucial role of twinship in the series, as it is the sisters’ discovery of their
twinship that sets up this unlikely domestic cultural blending. As we will see, the use of
twinship as the central trope of the show enables the hybridized racial and cultural
familial environment around which Sister, Sister revolves.
Throughout the series, the twins are continuously presented as paradoxically,
simultaneously alike and directly opposite. The pilot episode’s first scene portraying the
twins’ initial encounter shows the girls standing on both sides of a two-sided mirror,
adjusting their hats and collars, moving in total unison (3:22-3:26.) This image of the
twins’ mirror-image reactions reflects both the physical similarities and the completely
opposite behavioral and style differences with which the girls are depicted throughout the
show. Tia is intelligent and responsible, and Tamera is less academically inclined but
socially outgoing and carefree. The show’s theme song even accentuates the sisters’
obvious differences. Specifically, Sister, Sister’s fifth and sixth seasons open with a
remixed version of the show’s original theme song, this time highlighting the girls’
opposite fashion styles. As the song plays, the screen shows an array of dance and lip-
sync sequences, flashing between the two sisters, Tia, in moments, wearing a purple t
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shirt and black pants, and Tamera sporting a silk magenta button shirt with a black skirt
and tights. As the song ends, the twins are seen standing alongside a word binary—the
word “sister” written in purple and another “sister” written in magenta upside down and
underneath the first word, creating a shadow or reflection effect (“Fly Away Home,”
2:53-2:56). This imagery within the theme song makes clear the intentional portrayal of
the sisters as total binary opposites. The theme song’s lyrics further demonstrate this
intentionality. As a new verse is added to the show’s classic “Sister, Sister” chorus, Tia
sings, “I’ve got my own mind” (2:21-2:23). The song then fades from Tia to Tamera, who
sings, “I do my own style in my own time” (2:24-2:26). These lines clearly emphasize
Tia’s characterization as a “brainiac” and Tamera’s contrasting depiction as a semi-aloof
character who is preoccupied with her personal style and social intelligence. An earlier
iteration of the theme song contains equally polarizing illustrations accompanying
isolated images of the sisters throughout the progression of the song. In this version, Tia
appears, staring at the camera over an open book, with cartoon scissors and a test paper
marked with an A+ floating behind her, highlighting Tia’s academic excellence (“The
Natural,” 1:05-1:07). Tamera then appears, dancing, cartoon CDs float in front of her,
emphasizing her prioritization of her social life and entertainment over academics (“The
Natural,” 1:08-1:10). In this way, with perhaps more adherence than any other text
analyzed in this chapter, the show strictly upholds the stereotypical oppositional binary of
twinship.
Despite the consistent presentation of these polarities throughout the show,
however, the sisters are also represented as physically indistinguishable and
unwaveringly emotionally, and, perhaps spiritually, close. In the pilot episode, after the
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sisters meet, Lisa is offered a job in St. Louis, threatening to split up the sisters’ new
bond. In an effort to stay together, the girls plot a scheme to run away together,
abandoning their mother and father, vowing to make money as waitresses. The twins’
sincere resolve to face the uncertainties of running away as kids without money, jobs, or
shelter in order to stay together illustrates the extent of the inextricable closeness of their
twinship even after having only just met. In the show’s repeated illustrations of Tia’s and
Tamera’s indivisible connection despite extremely clear behavioral and personality
divisions, Sister, Sister’s portrayal of twinship may be read as undeniably paralleled to the
mythological views of twinship in Nigeria Ibeji, or “the inseparable two,” among other
African mythologies. This reading of African reflections within Sister, Sister is fitting,
considering the show’s many nods to Africa throughout its six-year running. This is easily
apparent even from the pilot episode, as the aesthetics of Lisa’s apartment offer
characterization for Lisa as a fashion designer, her refrigerator adorned with a sketch of
people in various colors and patterns of kente (8:24-11:45). These African clothing
references are carried throughout the show, as a portrait of a man wearing a kofi is
featured in Ray’s living room (“Fly Away Home,” 3:14-3:17). While these artistic and
stylistic choices may, in some senses, appear to reflect a fetishizing of African cultures
more than actual connections to the characters’ African heritage, they do reflect a
persistent African presence—even if it emerges merely as Americanized images—within
the cultural merging that is one of the main plot points throughout the series. Thus, tying
the show’s cultural and racial hybridity, illuminated by its twin protagonists, to the notion
of Africa’s and America’s inseparability.
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Like Tia and Tamera’s physical and emotional inseparability despite glaring
personality differences, there are several unconventional occurrences and thematic
pairings throughout the show, some of which are described below, that demonstrate an
ironic coexistence that seems to defy logic. For instance, one of the biggest sources of
contrast between the sisters in the beginning of the series is their opposite geographic and
socioeconomic backgrounds. The story takes place in Detroit. Tia was raised by her
single mother, who worked as a seamstress in an inner-city household. Tamera, by
contrast, lives in a suburban area, raised by her adoptive father, who owns a successful
limousine service. In the pilot episode, as Ray and Lisa sit in Lisa’s inner-city apartment,
Ray calls her lifestyle very “earthy.” Lisa says, “Now, Ray, may be my imagination, but
are you worried about this neighborhood?” to which Ray replies, “No, no. This is a great
neighborhood. I come down here whenever I want to buy my radio back” (10:50-10:59).
Lisa echoes Ray’s obvious discomfort in this unfamiliar domestic environment when she
travels “across town” to Ray’s lavish home. With a wide-eyed expression, Lisa enters the
house, exclaiming, “They charge admission to get into here?” (13:46-13:47). In spite of
their supposedly incompatible socioeconomic differences, Tia’s and Tamera’s twinship is
the driving force behind the new family’s intersecting social and cultural lives. The
family moves in together not just because of the girls’ new-found sisterhood; Lisa has
sold her apartment because she has landed an elite designing job in St. Louis. Tia’s
objections to their move because of her desire to remain close to Tamera leave Lisa and
Tia without a place to live. In this way, the merging of their cultural divides in the series,
are not only driven but necessitated by their girls’ twinship. Additionally, while Tia’s and
Tamera’s biological background is a matter of uncertainty throughout the first seasons of
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the show, towards the end of the series, they come to learn about and meet their
biological father—a white photo journalist. In this way, the sisters serve as an emblem of
African diaspora texts’ subversion of strict categorizations for markers of identity—in
this case, race and culture in particular. Paradoxically, this subversion of these binaries is
put into motion through harmful alignments with stereotypes—in this case, of course,
stereotypes pertaining to twins as parodically opposite and yet completely inseparable.
Through their presence as a clichéd binary in and of themselves—the sisters’ physical
alikeness contrasted with their completely dissimilar interests and behaviors, their strictly
opposite personalities while existing within a single paired entity, the contrasting nature
of this pairing, etc.—the sisters reflect the ironic possibilities for hybridized racial,
regional, and cultural identities to exist within this show, among other versions of
hybridity that the twins reflect and welcome through their roles as the protagonists of the
show; the colonial resistance inherent in this hybridity is most obvious in the differing,
and, therefore, mixed cultural and regional backgrounds of Tia and Tamera themselves,
along with their racial hybridity as biracial characters.
The Proud Family
Clearly designed for younger audiences, Disney’s The Proud Family de-centers its
twin characters, counterintuitively with a similar outcome to that of Sister, Sister; The
Proud Family’s presentation of twinship as a paradoxical binary ultimately conveys a
merging of supposedly incongruous realities. The animated series follows Penny Proud, a
black American teenage girl living in an extended-family household in California.
Penny’s younger siblings, babies Bebe and Cece, are portrayed as a pair of twin siblings
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who mostly take up space in the background of the show and are occasionally given a
role as a non-speaking plot device; they are rarely every given moments of character
development to make them substantial characters. Given their use as aesthetic figures
who most often seep into the background, it is logical that scholarship pertaining to The
Proud Family barely mentions Bebe and Cece at all. Many scholars, such as Catherine
Knight Steele and Danae Dunlap and Soo Park, discuss The Proud Family within
examinations of colorism in children’s television. In “Pride and Prejudice: Pervasiveness
of Colorism and the Animated Series The Proud Family,” Steele explains that, despite the
show’s representation of progressive, multi-racial and multi-cultural communities, the
show actually subscribes to colorism, which impacts its depictions of such attributes as
wealth and conventional beauty. And in “A Qualitative Content Analysis of Colorism in
Black Sitcoms,” Dunlap and Park cite Reddit conversations and even a Change.org
petition calling for changes to be made with regard to the series’ depictions of colorism in
the show’s reboot Louder and Prouder. Others, such as Hynndie Ozirus and Alyssa Dana
Adomaitis, in “Lookism: An Examination of Inequality in Appearance within Diversity
Practices,” similarly analyze the series through a study of its depictions of beauty. Debbie
Olson also analyzes the show’s beauty standards alongside its presentation of its
protagonist as capital. In “The Commodification of Ms. Penny Proud: Consumer Culture
in Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids and Disney’s The Proud Family,” Olson writes about
Proud’s self-identity which is “created by her relations to others through consumption,
which also places the African American child viewer into the subject position of
consumer, one who witnesses the power and desirability of capital and value exchange”
(184-185). Curiously, while these scholarly trends naturally reflect a heavy critical focus
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on the show’s illustrations of racial and cultural convergences, they almost always place a
heavy focus on the show’s protagonist, often never mentioning other characters who
create the show’s cultural and racial overlaps. The Proud Family’s treatment of its twins
as a narrative trope, representing both alikeness and difference, is a reflection of these
many overlaps.
In the original series, Bebe and Cece are often treated as merely aesthetic, their
orange and pink shirts nearly seamless with the predominantly orange and pink hues in
the background of most scenes. The twins are also given themed names, clearly named
after the gospel music duo Bebe & Cece Winans, giving them, like Black-ish’s Jack and
Diane, an air of kitschy ornamentalism as opposed to characterization that would make
them appear as distinct individuals; in other words, this themed naming for the twins
seems more akin to the lighthearted naming of decorative household objects than the
naming of actual humans. This show’s treatment of the siblings as simple decorations
without the need for characterization is, perhaps, most evident in the fact that Bebe is
barely even given a face, his dark, puffy hair perpetually covering his eyes and nose, and
a bottle or pacifier constantly drawn in place of his mouth. The only notable exception to
the show’s total lack of character development for Bebe and Cece is their terrorizing
interactions with the family dog, Puff; granted, even in these moments that seem to
develop the siblings’ personalities, their twinship is still treated as a terrifying trope. In
several scenes of comical relief throughout the series, the twins can be seen menacingly
crawling towards the petrified pooch, their arms and legs moving as one, ready to enact
momentary mischief, such as tying the dog to a rocket and launching him out the window
(“Bebe & Cece Moments,” 1:03-1:12) The focalization of these moments of terror
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through Puff’s perspective, the animation zeroing in squarely on the twins’ faces as they
become bigger and bigger, along with their obvious portrayals as infantilized, replicates
the use of twins as a fear-evoking device throughout the horror genre. Unlike the popular
horror trope of uncanny twinship, however, Bebe and Cece are depicted, even in these
moments of mirror-image terror, as completely opposite. At the basic level, Bebe is a boy,
and Cece is a girl. Bebe has dark, bushy hair, and Cece has thin, bristling, light-colored
hair. Because, in the original The Proud Family series, the twins are never granted much
agency or interiority, the show’s portrayal of the siblings’ as a phenotypical binary is the
main binary—the only binary— that characterizes them, exhibiting a total reliance on the
stereotypical presentation of twins as a completely antithetical pairing.
Bebe’s and Cece’s existence as a binary that simultaneously represents inherent
sameness as twinned siblings and complete difference as strict oppositions in gender and
appearance points to the show’s many other contradictory groupings. Among other
hybridized portrayals, the show depicts the family’s housing community comprised of
multi-racial, multi-ethnic families. Penny Proud’s friends and peers in her school
community also reflect this racial and cultural conglomeration, as scans of Penny’s
school cafeteria, for instance, display students who are visibly African American, Asian,
Latino, as well as blue—an ambiguity ascribed to characters who are racially nonspecific
but have African American features like cornrows (“Bring it On,” 13:23-14:36). As yet
another exemplification of the ways in which African diaspora texts often subvert
ideological constructs through an ironic subscription to those constructs, this show’s
presentation of racial and cultural differences, which are accentuated in several episodes,
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actually is what ultimately enables The Proud Family to present an image of unity that
outright challenges those stringent racial and cultural categorizations.
In addition to clearly breaking racial and cultural boundaries, as well as
generational and temporal boundaries, The Proud Family, like Black-ish and Sister,
Sister, also shatters the black-white binary by defying assumptions regarding black
families and low household incomes. Trudy Proud is a veterinarian, and Oscar Proud is
an entrepreneur who owns his own food company, Proud Snacks. Additionally, the
show’s richest character, Wizard Kelly—a politician and philanthropist—is a black man.
In these cases, the series subverts racial divides, again, by emphasizing them. The show
often places characters together and highlights these racial and class identifiers usually
within contexts that call attention to clear economic differences between various
members of the community, such as school or community events that draw awareness to
the characters’ differences in clothing or access to various exclusive items, such as high-
end technology. Contradictorily, in underscoring these racial divisions, the series is able
to reject those partitions by presenting these characters’ coexistence within the same
racially and culturally diverse community.
These rejections of traditional categorical divisions, specifically related to the
characters’ racial and cultural identities pertaining to their financial statuses, make of The
Proud Family a series that centrally subverts strict binaries designating culture and race
(while also, perhaps, to a lesser extent, subverting rigid generational and socioeconomic
binaries) and places characters of all backgrounds within the same spaces, also breaking
the boundary between light-hearted children’s programming and important social
commentary. As their stereotypical, simultaneous negative-image opposite twinship
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makes Bebe and Cece aesthetic, decorative plot devices, the twins are therefore natural
reflections of the overall thematic essence of the show. Their presence as a paradoxical
binary of antithetical twinship, then, becomes an important conveyer of the irony
essential within this subversion of strict racial and cultural designations. In this way, The
Proud Family is another example of black television that uses the trope of twinship in
ultimately conveying a resistance to colonial imaginaries for notions of racial and cultural
segregation, offering instead depictions of hybridized identities for the characters and
their community.
Twitches
Twitches also exhibits Disney’s presentation of twinship as an oppositional binary.
In Twitches, however, the twin sister characters are the central characters. Based on the
T*Witches children’s book series by H.B. Gilmour and Randi Reisfeld, the films follow
twin sisters Alex and Camryn, who are brought to Earth as protection from an evil force
taking over their homeland, a magical dimension known as Coventry. Even despite the
movies’ foundation as a book series, academic discourse surrounding the films is quite
limited. The films are sometimes mentioned in personal discussions of twinship, such as
Amber Zipfel’s creative work The Dissection of Twins, in which Zipfel writes of a
personal exasperation with popular characterizations of twins. Within this discussion,
Zipfel writes of television’s and films’ often inaccurate portrayals of twin relations, and
questions why real-life twins aren’t often employed as twin characters. Zipfel writes,
“[Disney films] use one girl to play both twins. Yes, that one, young girl may be very
talented and accurately showcase the differences between the two. However, I cannot
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seem to pinpoint why the entertainment business decides to represent twins like this, and
why they do not cast actual twins for the roles” (11) Zipfel mentions Twitches as one of
the few exceptions to this trend. And in Girlhood on Disney Channel: Branding,
Celebrity, and Femininity, Morgan Genevieve Blue also notes Twitches’ employment of
both sisters in focusing on their dual labor as child stars. Even though, in real life, Tia
Mowry and Tamera Mowry were twenty-seven when they filmed the original film, Blue
writes, “Disney Channel’s young female stars and viewers must be understood as laborers
in the production of the network’s girl-focused transmedia franchises” (13). Karen Dillon
also recognizes the extent to which Disney’s actors are regarded as especially marketable,
again, in her discussion of the commercialism surrounding representations of twins in
children’s films and television. Referencing Twitches specifically, Dillon explains that the
presentation of twins as exact opposites in children’s literature allows for better audience
engagement, as children are allowed the option to select their favorite twin:
A vast majority of juvenile media featuring twins represents them as binary
opposites, which allows kids to choose with which twin they want to identify;
juvenile (and parental) purchase power, then, lies in the reassurance that the
consumer can identify with either twin. In the Disney movies Twitches and
Twitches Too about twin witches, twin Camryn is rich, spoiled, excitable, and
loves ‘princessing’ in her new role as one of the royal princesses. Twin Alex, on
the other hand, is sophisticated, interested in college, and wants a more earthly
life (The Spectacle, 124).
Like Dillon, I believe it is plain to see that Twitches once again exemplifies children’s
television’s commitment to depictions of twinship as a pairing of direct opposites. This
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portrayal of Camryn and Alex as an opposite pair is apparent from the very beginning of
Twitches, as the twins are separated at birth and adopted into completely different
families. Camryn is raised in a wealthy household, affording luxuries, which include her
doting parents; when we meet Camryn, on her twenty-first birthday, her parents attempt
to surprise her with a homemade birthday cake, and her mother says, “What do you want
to do today? Today is all about you,” to which her father responds, saying “which is not
that different from yesterday or the day before that or the day before that…” (3:03-3:07).
Alex, on the other hand, is introduced in stark contrast to this pampered lifestyle; we see
Alex waking on her friend’s living room couch, being served a thrown-together breakfast
of yogurt, cereal, and candy corn with a birthday candle in the center. The scene hints at
the tragic death of Alex’s mother, who appears to be her only family. In addition to their
introduction of the twins’ extremely different lives, these back-to-back opening scenes
also reveal a number of drastic differences that reflect the sisters’ ultimate “two sides of
one whole” magic. For instance, Camryn’s parents’ attempts to surprise Camryn on the
morning of her twenty-first birthday fail, as the parents rush into her bedroom only for
Camryn to shout “Surprise,” making it evident she has already been awake. Camryn’s
mother says, “I told you we wouldn’t be able to surprise her. Long as the sun’s up, she’s
up” (2:34-2:37). Camryn’s sun amulet, worn as a necklace, further communicates her
natural obsession with the morning light and early rising. Completely contrastingly, Alex
is portrayed as a night owl, admitting that she was awake after midnight writing in her
journal: “Like my mom always said, she thinks I’m part werewolf. If the moon’s up then
I’m up” (4:19-4:25). Like Camryn, Alex wears an amulet, in the shape of a half-moon.
After the sisters discover they are twins, the sisters’ magical realities are revealed,
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painting the twins with even more polarity, as the twins’ original names, Apolla and
Artemis—after the Olympian twins, gods of the sun and moon, respectively—are
discovered. This new knowledge of the sisters’ biological identities also illuminates the
opposite hobbies towards which the sisters have always been unexplainably inclined;
Camryn (Apolla) is an artist, who, early in the morning, draws sketches of mysterious
people and places in another world; these images are revealed to be her unconscious
memories and knowledge of Coventry. Likewise, Alex (Artemis) is a writer, who, late at
night, writes stories about her unknown memories and knowledge of Coventry. These
glaring differences firmly establish the sisters as contrasting twin figures, ironically
setting up the twins to, in the end, uncover the magic that resides within their dualism as
an antithetical duo.
Despite all of this contrariety with which the sisters are depicted, in due course,
the films accentuate Camryn’s and Alex’s power as a twin force. After the sisters’ first
encounter (of course, in a clothing store), the twins discover that upon touching each
other, even by accident, the have the powers of telekinesis, conjuration, and astral magic,
giving them the comical abilities to strip clothing off of mannequins, turn carved
pumpkins’ frowns into smiles, and punish rude customers at restaurants. Later in the
narrative, the sisters discover a more meaningful ultimate purpose of their magic—
defeating the evil that has overtaken Coventry. Despite their stereotypical polarities, their
joint forces against evil in these moments reveal an ironic truth for the sisters; they are
completely powerful together, and completely inseparable and powerless when separate.
The dark force overtaking Coventry often reveals this inextricability of their joint,
opposing forces. During the first scene in which the dark force terrorizes the sisters, a
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black, foggy cloud engulfs the frame and threatens to devour them. As the cloud of doom
encroaches, Camryn screams “Alex” and runs towards her (46:28). As Camryn and Alex
race up the stairs to escape the evil force, Camryn trips, the dark cloud swallowing her
foot. As she cries out for Alex and Alex grabs her hand, the sisters’ hands exude energy,
and the dark cloud withdraws (46:43-46:58), revealing the stereotypical power of twin
inseparability. Additionally, in the dramatic climax, as the darkness has nearly completely
overthrown Coventry, the sisters seem to become temporarily blind, losing sight of one
another. As they frantically call out for each other, the cloud menacingly looms closer and
closer above their heads. However, as the sisters hold hands and divulge their sisterly
love for each other, the darkness is repelled (1:19:49-1:22:30). These moments reveal the
sisters’ blended, indivisible forces even despite their immense divergences with regard to
their personalities and cultural backgrounds. Because the story focuses almost
exclusively on this characterization of the sisters as an unlikely duo and their magical
battle against evil darkness, the narrative does not contain much blatant commentary on
real-world issues, such as race or class relations. However, the nature of the sisters’
twinship as a pairing of biracial sisters with completely opposite lifestyles formed out of
their different backgrounds—particularly their socioeconomic backgrounds—makes the
twin duo itself emblematic of these racial and cultural overlaps. Paradoxically, alongside
this adherence to twinship representations as stereotypically opposite and inseparable,
Twitches broadcasts the twin protagonists, ultimately, as heroines whose abilities to save
their homeland are possible only when their twin bond is strong enough to break through
the cultural, and socioeconomic, binaries meant to segregate them, hence, projecting an
ultimate rejection of conceptions of cultural stringency. In this rejection of rigid cultural
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separation, these twins, too, reflect a subversion of cultural division present, also, in my
ultimate understanding of Africa and America as never completely culturally segregated.
Through these readings of only a small number of African and African American
television and films that feature twin figures, this chapter has sought to continue this
project’s focus on how twinship is revealed to be instrumental in communicating the
fracturing of various supposedly unyielding boundaries—most notably, racial and cultural
borders (among several other binaries analyzed supplementarily, such as class,
generation, time, and gender). Paradoxically, the fracturing of orthodox categorical
thinking about race and culture—notions of impermeability that are critical within
ideological systems that uphold racism—is revealed in these texts through the
endorsement of orthodox, categorical visions of twinship as representing eerie sameness,
complete and total difference, or creepy or freaky super- or sub-humanness. Also like the
first and second chapters of this dissertation, I argue that these paradoxical uses of twin
stereotypes are cases in point for what I believe to be a nature of subversion that occurs in
African diaspora texts specifically, a common tradition among African and African
American texts of strategically employing the stereotypical to reveal un-stereotypical
realities, particularly related to notions of racial, regional, and cultural flexibility and
merging.
51
This chapter’s specific focus on film and television demonstrates that such
employment of the stereotypical for subverting colonial binaries is a form of resistance
that is shared across not only continents and genres but also media. In this way, this
51
As film and television, perhaps, offer the best optic for viewing the impacts of this constant perpetuation
of twinship stereotypes, this chapter also contributes a brief consideration of the real-life impacts of these
stereotypical portrayals on twins’ development of their identities.
182
chapter exhibits yet another “breakable binary” in the form of the division between media
forms, demonstrating that the “art of subversion” related to the paradox of using
stereotypes to reflect hybridity and fluidity—in this chapter and project, with particular
regard to race, region, and culture—is not limited to any one particular form of art and is
tied to a shared anti-colonial essence among African and African American authors and
creators.
183
CONCLUSION
Through these examinations of twentieth- and twenty-first- century African and
African American literature, film, and television featuring twinship, I hope to have
demonstrated a multitude of truths: 1.) That the world’s consistent fascination with
twinship makes twins, globally, but perhaps especially in African and African American
texts, perpetually stereotyped in their inevitable symbolization of duality, and this
perpetual stereotyping has real-world consequences for twins’ identity formations; 2.)
That these stereotypes with which twinship is virtually always depicted in African
diaspora texts are common across continents, time periods, genres, and media; 3.) That
this shared adherence to stereotypical representations of twins reveals the possibility of
shared cosmological roots between African and African American twin narratives; and 4.)
That this adherence to the stereotypical also exemplifies the nature of African and African
American texts’ destabilization of colonial perceptions particularly related to
constructions essential to the preservation of white superiority, a way of leaning into
harmful stereotypes for the purpose of what I call “reverse empowerment.” Identifying
this method of achieving colonial-resistant messages against rigid classifications as a key
to the achievement of hybridized markers of identity, such as race, culture, or region,
among many other constructions, is a crucial breakthrough in understanding the inherent
subversion of supposedly firm conceptual binaries throughout African diaspora texts—a
way of reading the black authors’ and creators’ employment of stereotypes meant to hurt
them as a tool for their advantage, harkening back to such works as Henry Louis Gates,
Jr.’s The Signifying Monkey.
52
What is more, twinship as a trope in these texts offers a
52
Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African American Literary Criticism.
Oxford University Press, 1989.
184
microcosm for viewing African diaspora texts’ reliance on the paradoxical. This
recognition of the paradoxical as central to the inherent work of subversion in African
and African American texts offers insight into paradoxes as a possible key ingredient for
creating effective, tangible colonial resistance.
Additionally, throughout this dissertation, I hope to have shown that, even in the
many stereotypical ways it is presented, twinship is persistently revealed to be a
performance of societal expectations, demonstrating its nature as a social construction as
much as it is a biological construction. This thinking of twinship in ways that reject a
traditional understanding of it as a mere scientific phenomenon enables new aspirations
for this work that reach beyond the confines of this current project. In addition to, of
course, adding texts that needed to be omitted in this project for the sake of length and
scope, such as Buki Papillon’s An Ordinary Wonder and the film The Silent Twins, in
future iterations of this work, I hope to invite new ways of understanding and interpreting
twinship in these texts. For this innovation, I would like to rely on my understandings of
twinship as existing beyond mere biology, as something that is not only heavily
influenced by society but may also be created by it. This is the notion of metaphorical or
figurative twinship, or twinship not in the traditional sense but conceptualized as spiritual
or fictive twinship or is a representation of duality that conveys “twinny” conventions
that holds the potential for a plausible reading of twinship. We see this kind of figurative
twinship time and time again in African and African American texts, from Walker’s
portrayals of Nettie’s and Celie’s emotional indivisibility despite years of separation to
Morrison’s depictions of Sethe’s and Beloved’s relationship as simultaneously adversarial
and inescapably emotionally bonded over the pain of the past, and from more obvious
185
instances of duality, such as Mariama Bâ’s continual name doubling in So Long a Letter
or the presence of eerie doubles in Jordan Peele’s film Us.
Beyond the potential I see for the work of this dissertation to be expanded to offer
new definitions for twinship, I would like to build upon this current edition of my work to
also include considerations of texts throughout the diaspora, beyond America, such as
Black British and Caribbean literature, including such obvious works as Helen Oyeyemi’s
White is for Witching and Diana Evans’s 26a. Additionally, I aspire to add examinations
of twinship representations throughout other media as well, such as visual media and
cultural productions, about which I do not currently possess the expertise to respectably
or confidently write. For instance, Nigerian painter and sculptor Twins Seven Seven
depicts themes of twinship and duality all throughout his artwork. The artist’s name alone
points to his closeness with twinship. For Twins Seven Seven, this connection is a close,
familial linkage, as he is the only long-term survivor of his mother’s seven twin
pregnancies. Twins Seven Seven’s pieces, such as Siamese Twins Monkeys and Faith in
One’s Religion, often display a single figure with features that seemingly conjoin the
figure to an identical other. In addition to the merging of patterns and media used to give
these pieces their ingenious distinctiveness, Twins Seven Seven’s conceptualization of his
artwork as only one piece in his artful performance also illuminates ways we might view
his art as binary-breaking. Touring throughout Nigeria and throughout America, dancing
alongside his pieces, Twins Seven Seven says, “People who do not understand my
language can dance to my Siamese Twins Monkeys music” (“Twins Seven Seven,” 10).
This bridging of cultural divides and linguistic barriers through the universal language of
dance echoes Twins Seven Seven’s ideas about the communicative power of artwork,
186
which bridges not only cultural or regional but also racial divides: “We are doing music,
art, and more, all very well honored. It can fill the long gap between black and white
because artists carry communication. In America, both black and white will come to my
exhibition." (11). Twins-obsessed American artist Jordan Casteel also points to these
cultural, regional, and racial crossings throughout her work, which often depicts everyday
stories of ordinary, often overlooked people in American society. For instance, Casteel’s
painting Twins is a portrait that depicts a boy-girl, toddler-aged twin pair in a double
stroller with matching red and pink hoodies sharing a blanket. While the painting
highlights the twins’ connectedness to one another, it also depicts them as a binary.
Staring straight into the lens through which Casteel has constructed for viewers to gaze,
the twins are positioned as a left-right binary. The boy twin sleeps, while the girl twin is
wide-eyed awake. The boy twin is slumped into the stroller, while the girl twin sits
upright and alert. And yet, even within this stereotypical depiction of twin polarity, the
portrait’s representation of the ordinariness and beauty of the black American children
creates a subversive lens through which to view urbanized, black American culture,
bridging racial and cultural divides between the subjects of Casteel’s work and the often-
whitewashed world of elite connoisseurship. For both Twins Seven Seven and Casteel,
twinship is a state that renders its subjects physically bound to one another—either within
the same body or tethered to the same apparatus—consistent with what Louise Siddons
calls “the visual subterfuge and overt theatricality” of twin imagery (“African Past” 440).
These visual representations of this performativity of twinship, among other cultural
productions that similarly exemplify this “theatricality,” such as ere ibeji figures in
187
Yoruba culture, are enormous motivations for me to add new modes of media to my
future expansions of this work.
In addition to adding these new genres and media as subjects of a larger work, I
would certainly like to expand my scope to consider other conceptual binaries that I
believe African and African American texts naturally subvert. It is my perspective that
nearly all markers of identity are subject to this hybridity-centered, anti-colonial rejection
of inflexible modes of self-categorization. Immediately, class, ethnicity, ability, religion,
gender, and sexuality all come to mind as additional conceptual borders that African
diaspora texts represent as permeable, even in spite of their paradoxical portrayals of
twinship through impermeably stereotypical framings.
All of these potential expansions of the work of this dissertation bring excitement
for the potential of this work to further shed light on the ultimate “twinship” between
African texts and African diasporic texts and to stage even further interventions in the
fields of twins studies, literary studies, comparative literature, film studies, transatlantic
studies, media discourse, and cultural studies. My hope is that this current edition of
Breakable Binaries is just the start of what will be a game-changing view of the
paradoxical nature of both twinship and African and African diasporic texts.
188
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VITA
Allison Wiltshire is a G. Ellsworth Huggins Fellow from Belmont,
Mississippi. Wiltshire received her MA and BA in English from
Mississippi State University and began her doctoral studies at the
University of Missouri-Columbia in 2019. In Fall 2024, Wiltshire will
begin a tenure-track position as an Assistant Professor.
