Title: Issues of Identity and Acculturation as a result of border- crossing with special reference to Ama Ata Aidoo’s Our Sister Killjoy

Abstract

According to Oxford English Dictionary, the term ‘Border’ refers to a line separating two countries, administrative divisions, or other areas. Basically border- crossing refers to the state of crossing any boundary and it results in the intersection of two different cultures. Identity refers to the close similarity or affinity and acculturation refers to assimilation to a different culture, typically the dominant one. Crossing of a border of any system basically results in the crisis of identity and acculturation with other system directly or indirectly. Multicultural theorist James Banks refers to “multiple acculturation” as the incorporation of different heritages into the identity development process (Dorris, 239). Ama Ata Aidoo’s Our Sister Killjoy attributes a lot of instances regarding the issues of identity and acculturation. The protagonist Sissie is found travelling many places and hence through her encounter with those settled people from Africa we can get the description of how the lives of those Africans have changed in the European land.This paper is an attempt to root out the instances of identity and acculturation as a result of crossing the border of a nation.