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Summary Americanah Notes
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The notes explore important themes on Americanah such as race, hair, racism, and racial identity, with all the relevant quotes.
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Table of ContentsIntroduction
Americanah
Identity
Race and Racism
Hair
Language and Accents
Nigerian Identity
Growth
Conclusion
Reference List
, Introduction
In Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah, the main character Ifemelu faces racism
and exploitation, as she faces these in the process she finds her racial identity. This
essay will therefore explore the themes related to identity formation of the protagonist.
Simone de Beauvoir, an early feminist thinker in her book The Second Sex, she wrote
about women being ‘othered’, that men always saw themselves as superior beings and
women being the other (de Beauvoir, 1974). Feminism rejects the idea of patriarchy.
Patriarchy literally meaning rule by the father, which is male domination, brought about
a male-centred universe, which believed that a women’s place was in the kitchen were
not intelligent that they did not need to learn and be educated (Barker & Jane, 2016).
Walker on the other hand came up with the concept of double marginalisation, because
she saw that feminism was initially a bourgeois white women’s movement and rarely
ever included women of colour. She saw that black and white women face different
kinds of prejudices (Walker, 2013)
AMERICANAH
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is a Nigerian born writer and a feminist thinker. She studied
Medicine in Nigeria, but eventually dropped out and went to America to study
Communications and Political Science. Her novel Half of a Yellow Sun won her the
2007 orange prize for fiction.
Adichie’s novel, Americanah, is known as a bildungsroman, which is a German word for
novel of growth. Growth in this particular novel takes place in two forms, physical growth
(childhood to adulthood) and growth of the self (emotional growth). In a bildungsroman,
the character needs to leave home in order for them to find their identity.
Barker and Jane (2016), define a diaspora as the scattering network of ethnically and
culturally related peoples and this concept focuses in the notions of travel, journeys etc.
the movement of people by choice or force from their own settlement is known as a
diaspora.
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