“Fierce Consumers of Life” Feminism in the Works of Chimamanda Adichie
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Corso di Laurea Magistrale in Lingue e letterature europee, americane e postcoloniali ordinamento ex D.M. 270/2004 Tesi di Laurea “Fierce consumers of life” Feminism in the Works of Chimamanda Adichie Relatore Prof. Shaul Bassi Correlatore Prof. Marco Fazzini Laureando Laura Biscaldi Matricola 831852 Anno Accademico 2016 / 2017 TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION...............................................................................................................2 1. ABOUT THE AUTHOR................................................................................................5 1.1 Her Life, Her Work.................................................................................................5 1.2 Encountering Feminism..........................................................................................9 2. FEMINISM AND FEMINISMS....................................................................................12 2.1 Women in Waves...................................................................................................12 2.2 Viral and International..........................................................................................25 2.3 The edges of each other's battles...........................................................................43 2.4 Mothers or Sisters: the African Variant.................................................................53 3. POSTCOLONIALISM AND FEMINISM.....................................................................58 3.1 Issues of Post-colonialism.....................................................................................58 3.2 Postcolonial Feminism and the Third World Woman...........................................72 4. EXPLORING ADICHIE'S TEXTS...............................................................................80 4.1 Purple Hibiscus.....................................................................................................80 4.2 Half of a Yellow Sun..............................................................................................96 4.3 The Thing Around Your Neck..............................................................................110 4.4 Americanah.........................................................................................................122 5. ADICHIE, FEMINISM AND POP CULTURE.........................................................141 CONCLUSION...............................................................................................................147 BIBLIOGRAPHY............................................................................................................150 Primary Sources........................................................................................................150 Secondary Sources....................................................................................................150 Video Sources...........................................................................................................156 1 INTRODUCTION Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, perhaps the most famous representative of Nigeria's third generation of writers, is the author of three novels, a collection of short stories, and two essays. Her literary achievements include a number of awards, such as the Commonwealth Writers' Prize in 2005 for her first novel, Purple Hibiscus, and the Bailey's Women's Prize (formerly the Orange Prize for Fiction) in 2015 for her second novel, Half of A Yellow Sun. She is read worldwide, with her works translated into over thirty languages. Adichie's notoriety, however, is not limited to her published works: as a matter of fact, she is the author and star of two extremely successful speeches on the TED platform and website, the first of which, 2009's The Danger of A Single Story, is ranked among the site's top ten most-viewed videos of all time1. Both The Danger of A Single Story and her 2013 speech, We Should All Be Feminists, are generally considered viral videos, their reach spreading far beyond the breadth of the TED website, YouTube, and a variety of other online platforms and forums. The impact of these speeches on popular culture may also be seen in the choice made by American pop star Beyoncé to sample We Should All Be Feminists in her ***Flawless music video. As may be gathered from the title of her 2013 speech, Adichie is a self-defined feminist and a vocal activist, both in the media and in real life events, as testified by her participation in the 2017 Women's March on Washington. She has published articles on The New Yorker, has been featured four times on the fashion magazine Vogue UK, and appears in various filmed interviews and conventions, easily accessible online. She was even chosen as the new testimonial for the Boots No7 line of cosmetics, a decision which boosted her visibility to the point of her coming to claim that she "wasn't quite aware of how many pictures of me would be out there. It makes me feel a little vulnerable."2 Indeed, Adichie's fame has spread to the point of her being heralded as "an international celebrit[y]"3 by many and, likewise, her notoriety has given renewed attention to feminist consciousness and effort today. 1 Clare Garner. "About the Author,” Purple Hibiscus (London: Fourth Estate, 2003), 310. 2 Valeriya Safronova. "Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Talks Beauty, Femininity and Feminism," New York Times, November 28, 2016, accessed February 12, 2017, <https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/28/fashion/chimamanda-ngozi-adichie-boots-no7-makeup.html? _r=0> 3 Lindsey Green-Simms. "The Emergent Queer: Homosexuality and Nigerian Fiction in the 21 st Century,” Research in African Literatures 47, no. 2 (2016):143. 2 The purpose of this text is to examine the dual figure of Adichie as an author and a vocal 'celebrity', within the framework of a feminist perspective. As a matter of fact, the present text aims to contextualize Adichie's definition of feminism from two main perspectives. The first refers to the concept of the 'wave' metaphor in regards to feminist history and places Adichie within the breadth of what is being hotly debated as feminism's fourth wave. The second perspective is concerned with the contents and the political aims of Adichie's feminism and identifies her ideas as akin to intersectionality. This term was coined by UCLA and Columbia law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw in the 1980s to define how an individual is characterized by multiple identities (e.g. race, gender, sexual orientation, etc.) and, therefore, how multiple axes of discrimination (e.g. racism, sexism, homophobia, etc.) are enacted simultaneously, leading to an urgent need for a feminist movement inclusive of multiple issues4. On a further note, while the concept of the fourth wave and intersectional feminism may be related to Adichie, a third perspective is needed when examining her work, i.e. that of postcolonialism. Indeed, whether she faces the topic of diaspora in the USA or the UK or of mimic culture in post-Independence Nigeria or of the destabilized politics of her country inherited with the fall of British colonial rule, Adichie's works are laden with the burden of history and its consequences. She does not shy away from 'writing back' to the predominantly white literary canon. To this end, her own words in her 2009 TEDTalk The Danger of A Single Story emphasize literature's power to reshape psychological reality and the need for authentic representation in literature, especially for readers from the ex-colonies: So I was an early reader and what I read were British and American children's books. I was also an early writer and when I began to write at the age of seven [...] I wrote exactly the kinds of stories I was reading. [...] What this demonstrates, I think, is how impressionable and vulnerable we are in the face of a story, particularly as children. Because all I had read were books in which characters were foreign, I had become convinced that books, by their very nature, had to have foreigners in them and had to be about things with which I could not personally identify.5 4 Crenshaw states: "It's important to clarify that the term was used to capture the applicability of black feminism to anti-discrimination law. [...] You’ve got to show that the kind of discrimination people have conceptualized is limited because they stop their thinking when the discrimination encounters another kind of discrimination [...] I wanted to come up with a common everyday metaphor that people could use to say: “it’s well and good for me to understand the kind of discriminations that occur along this avenue, along this axis - but what happens when it flows into another axis, another avenue?" Kimberlé Crenshaw, as quoted by Bin Adewunmi. "Kimberlé Crenshaw on intersectionality: 'I wanted to come up with an everyday metaphor that anyone could use'," New Statesman, April 2, 2014, accessed February 10, 2017, <http://www.newstatesman.com/lifestyle/2014/04/kimberl- crenshaw-intersectionality-i-wanted-come-everyday-metaphor-anyone-could> 5 Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. "The danger of a single story | Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie,” YouTube video, 19:16, posted by TED, October 7, 2009, 0:34 <https://www.youtube.com/watch? 3 The importance of analyzing Adichie's works from multiple perspectives is evident in her claims that one cannot reduce a people or a concept to a single story without the incipient risk of breeding stereotype and discrimination6. Therefore, while working mainly from a feminist perspective, this text argues that Adichie's works are peopled with characters,