Exploring Narratives: Gender, Race and Language in the Works of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

This dissertation analyses the works of Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie by exploring her writings, her major influences and her treatment of key themes. By employing a postcolonial, feminist and linguistic approach, this dissertation addresses how the author develops topics related to gender, class, power, race and language. In order to approach the meaning of postcolonialism and the context this author engages with and often alludes to in her texts, the first chapter offers a comparative analysis of Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1858) and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902). The second chapter focuses on the description of female characters in Achebe’s novel and Adichie’s short story “The Headstrong Historian”, published in the collection The Thing around Your Neck (2008), as they both depict precolonial Igboland and the arrival of the missionaries. Through a close reading of Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus (2003) and Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), the third chapter addresses gender roles, female autonomy and the clashing of cultures in a postcolonial country scarred by conflict. Finally, the author’s linguistic choices and the diglossic nature of her texts are examined in the last chapter. By using code-witching and code-mixing, Adichie renders the multilingualism of her country, she reflects and critiques the ways in which language can be a means of power and she designates English as one of the languages of Africa.