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“An Unapologetic Love Story”: Adichie’s Gendered Romance with Africa

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“An Unapologetic Love Story”: Adichie’s Gendered Romance with Africa‎‎Adichie herself has called Americanah an “unapologetic” love story, and it is indeed remarkable how extensively it adheres to and inverts the narrative strategies of romantic genre fiction (Sehgal 2013: para. 15). To offer some anecdotal insight, I once overheard two women in a café discussing the […]

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“An American Pathology”: Reading Americanah as Quest Romance

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‎ ‎As Adichie remarked in an interview about the novel: “I am more or less expected, or maybe permitted, to write about African pathology, but I don’t think I am expected to write about American pathology” (Sehgal 2013: para. 21). At this point, it may be useful to distinguish what the novel’s turn toward realism

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“A Bitter Americanizing”: Gendered Violence in the Aftermath of Slavery

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‎Americanah is part of a discourse that diversifies notions of Blackness in the diaspora. This is what Goyal asserts when she notes that “the novel self-consciously foregrounds its own reception as a new kind of black novel, an exploration of blackness that does not highlight injury or trauma, but focuses on romantic love, hair, and

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‎”True from Experience”: Reception and the Realness of Racialization

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‎Writing about the 19th-century realist novel in The Bourgeois, Franco Moretti argues that “description as a form was not neutral at all: its effect was to inscribe the present so deeply in the past that alternatives became simply unimaginable” (93). One could argue that Americanah employs realism in an effort to document the facticity and

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You Can’t Write an Honest Novel About Race in This Country

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Reading for Race‎‎Both in terms of style and content, the Washington Times opinion piece resembles Ifemelu’s successful race blog in Americanah. Here, Ifemelu satirizes her initiation into America’s racial order in a blog post titled “To My Fellow Non-American Blacks: In America, You Are Black, Baby” (220). She recounts her bewilderment at an almost indecipherable

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Independent Women Romance, Return, and Pan-African Feminism in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah

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‎”Since I must not all the same allow you to look at the future through rose coloured glasses, you should know that what is arising, what one has not yet seen to its final consequences […] is racism, about which you have yet to hear the last word. Voilà!”‎‎Jacques Lacan‎‎”The desire of the text (the

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In the Swirl of Other People’s Stories

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Toward an Ethics of Listening‎‎Benjamin develops his Angel of History – the historical materialist view of history – apropos the dominant historicism of his time, which not only claims to understand the past “the way it really was” but naturally sympathizes with the victor’s story (2003: 391). Notably, while often being attentive to the histories

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Voices Cut Out of the Past Into the Present”

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Blackness in Diaspora Time‎‎The ambiguity of its metahistorical purport notwithstanding, Open City provides a staunch critique of totalizing aspirations of mastery, whether in relation to historical discourse, temporality, space, or through these theme’s metaphorical amalgamation: movement. Repeatedly, Julius is shown as failing in his attempts at mastery, feigning a sense of coherence he cannot quite

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‎ “To Experience the Pain Afresh”

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Metahistory and the Circling Movement of Melancholia‎‎Compared to the other novels I discuss in this book, Open City addresses the notion of race much less overtly. To a large extent, this is due to Julius’s self-fashioning as a “rooted cosmopolitan” apropos Anthony Kwame Appiah, as we see him repeatedly wrestle with and bristle at various

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‎”To Trace Out a Story”: Narrating Movement and the Movement of Narrative
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With its vast array of historico-ontological and metaphorical connotations, movement can easily be identified as a master trope of the Black Diaspora, be it the forced movements and removals of colonialism and transatlantic enslavement, the northbound movements of the Underground Railroad, the Great Migration, Post-war emigration from the colonies, or the complex flows of contemporary

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