Representation of Nigerian History and Diaspora in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Short Stories (original) (raw)
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The aim of this paper is to provide a comparative analysis of the representations of Nigerian women in a short story collection The Thing Around Your Neck (2009) by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. In a feminist critical reading I will examine two texts: The Arrangers of Marriage and Jumping Monkey Hill, focusing on the notion of Afropolitanism, a term coined by Taiye Selasi, who posed a question about multiple identity and sense of belonging, as well as challenging the enduring problematics of the hybrid, cross-cultural experiences of Africans living in a different cultural context. Furthermore, the paper identifies the gender issues that have affected Nigerian women within new socio-cultural landscapes, such as female consciousness about gender roles, subversion and Afropolitan practices towards empowerment and self-awareness.
Romanian Journal of English Studies, 2014
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie argues in her 2009 collection of short stories that in as much as brutal dictatorship together with extreme underdevelopment propel young Nigerians for immigration, inaccurate and often scandalizing media portrayal also has nonetheless an important share in the sad drama. Her drama proposes way of circumventing cultural reification caused by inaccurate media representation.
In this essay I will examine the characteristics of narrative strategy used by Nigerian writer and activist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in her novel " Americanah " with special reference to Igbo language. The paper provides examples of several expressions in Igbo taken from the novel such as phrases, sentences, proverbs and other lexical items. Using the concept of the migrant identity for my analysis I argue that her narrative strategy including certain Igbo context as base for recognition could be interpreted as the method of manifestation of different self-identifications, global identities and a dynamic sense of belonging from a perspective of Nigerian writer living in the United States.
Forum for World Literature Studies, 2022
verview Stats Comments Citations References (19) Related research (10+) Share More Abstract This paper puts flesh on the bones of questions concerning identity deformation of Nigerian immigrants in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s collection of short stories The Thing Around Your Neck (2009). Adichie tries to understand the drastic effects of immigration on those who are living on the crossroads of cultures. Indeed, African contemporary literature is preoccupied with immigration and identity that are among the most important formative experiences of our era. Therefore, using Adichie’s short stories as a guide and a focal point, the paper attempts to analyze and examine the cultural mixture that shapes the identity of postcolonial African immigrants in the USA. The study attempts also to offer an inside insight into the complex and often sad reality of modern-day Nigerian immigrants, and how they are transformed into fragmented hybrid individuals torn between two worlds in their struggle for belongingness. Frantz Fanon’s theory of inferiority complex, Homi Bhabha’s concepts of hybridity and mimicry, Stuart Hall’s cultural theories and others are quiet significant to show how postcolonial immigrant subjects define themselves according to the American cultural values giving way to a hybrid form of identity through a process of mimicry and self-alienation and inferiorization. The paper concludes that immigration causes characters’ metamorphosis and depersonalization. It is like an initiation into a limbo territory where immigrants are adrift.
Nigerian Immigrants Experience in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’ Americanah
2019
Human migration is not something new in human history; it is as old as human history itself. Right from ancient times, mankind has moved from one country to another in search of food and shelter. In modern era, the wave of human migration has increased due to some factors such as political instability, war, and starvation caused by natural disaster. This experience of dislocation has given rise to a new body of knowledge known as migration study. In literary discourse, migration study which studies immigrant experience has received wide attention in literary discourse of Caribbean, Indian and Latino literature. In Nigerian literature, immigrant experience has not received sufficient critical discussion. Consequently, this paper examines Nigerian immigrant experience, the sense of crisis, upheaval and up rootedness that Nigerian characters experience in America and Europe. This study will focus on two aspects of Nigerian immigrant experience namely: racial discrimination and economic...
Deconstructing the 'single story': Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Americanah
2018
Stories in literature and in mythology carry a unique ability to teach, admonish, and denounce while representing a way to fight against conventional images and ideas. This article analyses Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Americanah (2013) as a postcolonial coming-of-age story, which rewrites the stereo-typical plot of romance and the male-female double Bildungsroman, from the perspective of two mar-ginalized characters, simultaneously deconstructing the Eurocentric patriarchal literary canon. Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Fiction award, the novel describes the formative processes of a heroine and a hero who meet and fall in love in Nigeria, migrate to the West, and ultimately reunite in their home country fifteen years later. Through the tension of adaptation and resistance to white norms and white privilege, racism, sexism, and classism of British and American societies, Adichie attempts to define the hybrid identity of the two protagonists and explore their strategies of resistance to overcome suffering. Approaches to gender, decolonization, globalization and Afropolitanism have been purposely adopted to clarify and deepen the analysis of their stories, with a special focus on the importance of Nigeria for the writer and her characters in the interconnection between Africa and the West, the 'global South' and 'global North'.
IJASS JOURNAL, 2024
The representation of migration which is still viewed as a human movement has become a global issue. The concept becomes one of the core subjects of many contemporary writings in African literature. The main cause of this phenomenon of migration remains unemployment, state repression, violence, conflict, xenophobia as well as dictatorial and authoritarian regimes. In the context of African literature, African intellectuals exile due to political repression. They go in search for a new identity. In African literary scene, many intellectuals face the experience of exile. Among them, we can name Chinua Achebe, Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, Alex La Guma to name but a few writers who left their homelands in quest of political stability.
2015
Over the last few decades the idea that postcolonial theory and its praxis have to be appropriated to our cultural needs has gained ground. This has led to examining various questions relating to postcolonial issues; questioning the relevance of the need to „write back‟ to the empire; the need to rewrite history and question how long can one countenance the „post‟ situation. In this context literary texts from erstwhile colonies have been read to locate them within the parameters of „postcolonial‟ where the „post‟ situation seems to be an “infinite aftermath”. Writers need to go beyond the historical instrumental hypothesis without making the colonial encounter the primary structure of history. A new discursive space has to be created with discourses that produce national cultures by moving out of historical imbalances and cultural inequalities engendered by the colonial encounter. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is one such writer from Nigeria whose themes have moved beyond those imposed ...
This article argues that the female characters in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s short story collection "The Thing Around Your Neck" (2009) go through mental developments similar to epiphanic experience as recently defined by Matthew G. McDonald. The characters, who are often living in the diaspora, feel themselves caught between their African background and influences from the West. In reflecting upon their situation, they gradually acquire a better view of their problems that allows them to distance themselves from their present circumstances and to envision a future that would better satisfy their needs. Adichie depicts these mental developments by subtle literary devices which benefit from narrative experiments, words from Igbo vocabulary and devices known from African storytelling traditions.
2022
This article analyses two novels published by two writers of Nigerian-Igbo descent: Buchi Emecheta's Second-Class Citizen (1974) and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Americanah (2013), examining the connections between the authors' and their female characters' movements and mobilities. This essay first compares the two fictions and the different migration experiences of the two novels' main protagonists, Adah and Ifemelu, in the United Kingdom and the United States, respectively. Second, it shows how these texts can be read as what Carole Boyce Davies describes as "uprising textualities" (1997), that is, narratives of women's resistance, reassertion, renewal and rethinking that simultaneously celebrate women's creativity. Writing, indeed, plays a pivotal role for both the novelists and their characters. It is not only a tool to explore their personal experiences in the Global South and the complex relationships between their travels and the spaces of marginality in which they live, but it is also a political instrument to denounce social inequalities, challenge hegemonic representations, and Eurocentric and masculine epistemologies. This paper aims to demonstrate how the "South" also exists in the geographic North and how the novelists and their respective fictional characters, through writing, voice their "creative uprisings" and simultaneously negotiate their complex and multifaceted identities and subjectivities in different times and spaces.