Race and Gender in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah S

Abstract

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is one of the most powerful, successful and internationally rewarded African authors of twenty-first century after Wole Soyinka and Chinua Achebe. Adichie was born as the fifth of sixth children and raised in Nsukka, Nigeria. Her father was a professor at the University of Nigeria and her mother was the university’s first female registrar. Adichie studied medicine at the university and then moved to the United States at age 19. She received master’s degrees from Johns Hopkins and Yale, and she was awarded the MacArthur Fellowship “Genius Grant” in 2008. She has published poems, short stories, a play, and three novels - Purple Hibiscus, Half of a Yellow Sun, and Americanah. Her third novel Americanah won the 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction and was selected as one of the ten Best Books of 2013 by the editors of the New York Times Book Review. Adichie is currently married and divides her time between Nigeria and the United States.