Shifting intersections: Fluidity of gender and race in

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah

Mary Margaret Bonvillain

Iowa State University – 2016

INTRODUCTION

In 2003, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie released her debut novel Purple Hibiscus, which
immediately established her as a prize-winning and best-selling author. Set in Nigeria, her first
book focused on a young girl’s coming-of-age and identity crises while living with her abusive
father, silent mother, and protective older brother.

(…)

In interviews and lectures, Adichie has confirmed that her writing is grounded in her own
childhood and life experiences (Gross; Klarl). As a child, Adichie wrote stories with characters
and plots that drew on British phenomenon and culture—snow, apples, and ginger beer—
which she had never personally experienced, although they densely populated the texts she
was given to read. As a consequence, Adichie has repeatedly declared, “[Achebe’s] work gave
[her] permission to write [her] own stories” (“The Danger…”). Since this revelation, Adichie’s
writing has progressively flourished through her creation of stories, foremost addressed to her
Nigerian audience. She, indeed, provides the latter public with stories with which Nigerians can
choose to identify, yet she simultaneously engages her broader Western audience to consider
— and gain some knowledge of—the joys and tribulations a native of Nigeria or African
immigrant can encounter.

With her latest novel Americanah (2013), Adichie gives her readers a narrative that, once
more, reflects some of her own life and experiences while also conversing with recent
scholarly discussions of identity. Specifically, she focuses on the effect that the experience of
migration—namely from a Western African country such as Nigeria—has on one’s identity.
Americanah’s narrative centers on Ifemelu and her relationships with family, friends, and
lovers, but it also follows the story of her childhood sweetheart, Obinze, who eventually
becomes her adult lover.

(…)
Because Americanah was published in 2013, it has only just begun to receive critical attention
from literary scholars. Thus far, few peer-reviewed scholarly publications have even examined
the novel.

Furthermore, most scholarly research conducted on Adichie has focused on “Generation” by

Heather Hewett who discusses Purple Hibiscus, and Adichie’s ability to write in multiple
literary traditions.

(…)

Nevertheless, newly published articles are slowly beginning to fill the gaps, for example “The
Power of a Single Story: Narrating Africa and Its Diasporas,” by Daria Tunca and Bénédicte
Ledent. Tunca and Ledent illuminate why Adichie has focused so specifically on two
immigrants and their diaspora experiences. Diaspora texts like Americanah they write,
“[R]efus[e] to homogenize the image of Africa and to iron out the differences between various
African diasporic experiences.

(…)

Despite the growing scholarship, few scholars have published articles on Americanah. My
thesis, then, represents one of the few academic contributions to the discussion of Adichie’s
most recent novel. I contend that Americanah significantly participates in current studies,
occurring across diverse intellectual fields, of migration and its effects on transnational
identities.

Providing Americanah as an example text that “issues a challenge to scholars of race and
postcolonialism to more fully analyze the workings of race in global contexts,” Yogita Goyal
declares, “[T]he novel inaugurates an important and long overdue conversation about the
specificity of a Nigerian experience of racialization in the US and the UK, tying it firmly to
bothclass and gender” (xi) Thus, I argue Adichie’s investigation through the fictional Nigerian
emigrants, Ifemelu and Obinze, of the fluidity and fluctuations of identity must be examined
through the lens of intersectionality because the issues Ifemelu and Obinze encounter extend
much deeper than one simple analysis based solely on nationality or gender or race or
geographic location could unearth. Rather, because of the complex interrelations between
these identity factors, Americanah lends itself textually to an intersectional identity analysis.
This is primarily due to the protagonists’ movement between distinct geographic boundaries
which, in turn, produce clear identity alterations since Ifemelu and Obinze attempt to enter
new countries and cultures where they are perceived as different. My analysis of Americanah
will, therefore add the necessary and missing perspective that examines how intersectionality
operates within the novel as well as the identity fractures and formations brought about by a
Nigerian emigrant’s experiences—the personal cost of immigration.

https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=7442&context=etd