Searching for an Identity of Our Own: Analyzing Adichie’s Americanah

Abstract

In 2013 Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novel Americanah was published. Despite it being a fictional work, her author did infuse it with many instances that taint the novel with biographical undertones. Adichie “grew up in Nsukka, a small university town in southeastern Nigeria” (2008) and later moved to the United States for college, a period in which she recalls facing numerous assumptions and stereotypes about herself—much like the protagonist and many other characters in the novel. This narrative of emphasizing the complexities of the human condition and the despise for assumptions and simplistic generalizations have been central in Adichie’s discourse, a clear and well-known example of that is her TED talk “The Danger of a Single Story” (2009). This discourse reminisces the postmodernist view of the multiple and decentered subject yet prioritizing how individuals reconcile the different layers of their identities.