This paper examines the representation of cross-cultural encounters in select Asian and African fiction, with particular attention to the ways migration, colonial history, and diaspora produce fractured yet dynamic identities. Drawing primarily on M. G. Vassanji’s No New Land and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah, the study argues that cross-cultural contact in these texts is neither harmonious nor wholly destructive; rather, it creates a contested space in which identity is constantly negotiated. Scholarship on Vassanji repeatedly emphasizes double migration, memory, and the in-between position of Asian Africans, while work on diasporic assimilation highlights the tensions between belonging and exclusion. Through a postcolonial framework informed by hybridity, interstitiality, and diaspora studies, this article shows that cross-cultural encounters often generate alienation, racial anxiety, and cultural conflict, but also produce new forms of subjectivity and belonging. The paper contends that Asian and African fiction offers an important archive of transnational experience in which cultural difference is not erased through assimilation but reworked through struggle, negotiation, and memory.

Keywords

Cross-cultural encounter; diaspora; hybridity; identity; M. G. Vassanji; African fiction; Asian fiction; postcolonialism.