Feminism and post-coloniality in the work of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Feminism and post-coloniality in the workviolence and representations from African literature

Abstract

African literature has established itself as a space for reflection, denunciation of systemic oppressions and construction of identities. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie captures in her stories, grouped under the title The Thing Around Your Neck, the experiences of racialized women and men framing their emotions and feelings in the complex social and political dynamics in Nigeria and the United States from a feminist and postcolonial perspective. Thus, even though in Africa there has been a resistance to the postcolonial and to feminism as analytical categories, due to the homologation of imperial and gender subordination, both approaches have allowed us to deepen the analysis of hegemonic submission from the expansion of colonial capitalist modernity, making violence visible and proposing alternatives to the systemic structure. In her stories, Adichie enunciates, questions, and proposes alternatives to the structural axes of domination. In this way, in this text some categories of analysis proposed by Adichie are identified to answer the questions: how are these oppressions narrated? And how does what is described relate to African realities? To do this, the debates in Africa around the postcolonial and feminisms will be briefly explained, to later recover five lines of analysis that are recovered in The Thing Around Your Neck: (1) stereotypes and language, (2) racism and migration, (3) violence against women, (4) lesbianism and African sexualities, and (5) State, corruption, and disappearance.