A Companion to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

2017 | Essays

Easily the leading and most engaging voice of her era and generation, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has bridged gaps and introduced new motifs and narrative styles which have energized contemporary African fiction since her first novel, Purple Hibiscus (2003). With Half of a Yellow Sun (2007) and The Thing Around Your Neck - Short Stories (2009), she established herself as a preeminent story-teller. Americanah (2013), with ingenious craftsmanship addresses the sensitive themes of passionate love, independence, freedom and moral responsibility with extravagant and versatile narrative innovations. Through her writings, she has made herself relevant to people of all ages - across racial and linguistic boundaries. Her talks, blogs, musings on social media, essays and commentaries, workshop-mentoring for budding young writers, lecture circuit discourses, all enrich her imaginative creativity as they expand and define her mission as a writer. "We Should All be Feminists" she proclaimed in an essay, giving feminism a "tweak and twist" and suggesting new outlooks in literary theory.

Her contributions to African, Diasporic and World literatures deserve serious analyses, commentaries and interpretations, and this Companion to her work critically examines her creative outputs from her art and ideology, from feminism to war, to matters of myth and perception, and the challenges of multicultural existence and complex human identities. Ernest N. Emenyonu is Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Michigan-Flint, USA.

Ernest N. Emenyonu (Author)