Looking Back to Look Forward: Decolonizing, and Re-narrativizing Contemporary African Women’s Perceptions in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah
Lagos Studies Association Annual Conference, 2025
Abstract
African women have always battled with their confined traditional roles and how they are not only perceived at home, but also in the world. Existing studies have explored African women writers’ resistance to Western ideologies and patriarchal constructs and sometimes derogatory presentation; however, this paper uses a qualitative methodology and adopts postcolonial feminism to interrogate Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah. It calls attention to notions of race, gender, and hegemonic power structures through Ifemelu’s struggle against racial and gender stereotypes. Offering a complex portrayal of their womanhood and resilience, Adichie narrativizes how modern African women can reclaim their agency by bridging historical and misleading ideas of their capabilities and roles in society. Also, by situating African women’s lived experiences at the center of her narrative, Adichie offers a framework for understanding the continuity between historical legacies and present-day inequalities. In dismantling colonial-held views of African women through the subversion of dominant ideologies, this paper emphasizes the need to address both historical erasures and current misrepresentations, thereby positioning Adichie’s Americanah as a critical text for rethinking modern African women’s narratives and writings. The paper charts new possibilities for African studies to look back to look forward across contemporary women’s issues by fostering nuanced dialogues of transformation, agency, and the reclamation of African women’s voices and narratives.
Keywords: postcolonial, decolonization, feminism, (mis)representation, agency, African women.