apparently makes the hassles of the nation state undesirable, as a community of exiles
enjoys an enhancement in their status far away from their postcolonial countries of origin.
However, as Tariq Modood (2007:6) explains, this is not to say there is a complete
obliteration of difference within the context of multiculturalism, as issues of racism and
ideologies are implicated in the designation of migrants as inferior in the socieities into
which they have chosen to settle. Yet while the suspension of difference lasts, part of the
substance of the benefit that comes with such a status is articulated, for instance, in
Anyidoho’s EarthChild where in Bloomington (37) Yaa and Owusu Brempong are
commended for “bring[ing] Ghana home in a feast of highlife cultural things” in far away
US. Besides, other characters are able to forge an alliance between African cosmopolitans
and their diasporan African-Americans, among them a diva, who, we are told, “walk[s]
away with all our history braided on your head” (41). However, there is a limit to which
this kind of ecstatic moment can sustain the exilic condition of the African cosmopolitan.
Needless to say, it explains why the imperative of return in the work cannot be obscured.
One indication of the limits of multiculturalism in this particular instance, as I have
argued in the conclusion to the analysis of the text, is the dialectic existing between the
condition of the African-Americans and that of the postcolonial African exiles.
To expatiate on the identity of the African-American in the multicultural society of
America, there is already a marginalized image that the identity cuts because of the
existence of an institutionalized marginalization of this identity. Perhaps one telling
validation of this assertion is to be found in Andrew Hoberek’s (2004:278-9) allusion to
the accrual of “urban triage and literary multiculturalism” in the American society to
justify the continual “ghettoization and displacement” of the black American population
through an overall alibi of black criminality. Using James Lee’s thrust in the fiction The
Wire as background to his analogy, the tripartite condition of wounded soldiers becomes
an apt illustration of the American social condition and the basis on which policy
formulation and implementation are based: “those who need urgent attention, those who
require medical care but can wait, and those whose injuries are so extreme that they are
beyond help” (Lee in ibid 378). Moving on thereafter to interpret the application of this to
the African-American condition, Hoberek explains that the social equation of the