Critical Race Studies

“An American Pathology”: Reading Americanah as Quest Romance

7 Comments / MAKING BLACK HISTORY /

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

9 Comments / MAKING BLACK HISTORY /

‎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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