Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Adichie is a literary tour de force that examines Nigerian culture through the lens of three main characters. The novel focuses on violence and the familial relationships of core characters over a significant...

Cultural identity used to be relatively simple, since in the pre-globalization era, cultures were somewhat homogenous and many people stayed within one culture for the majority of their lives. However, the contemporary world offers challenges to...

The novel Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie describes the life of a teenage girl, Kambili, who is raised in Nigeria. In the novel, Adichie uses two main settings to effectively describe the themes of freedom, silence, and repression. The...

The novel Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Adichie, set in post-colonial Nigeria during the Civil War in the late 1960s, is a bildungsroman that focuses greatly on family relationships as well as religious and cultural ideals. The passage describing...

Chimamanda Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus and Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart both emphasize the complexities of father-son relationships. The major theme of parental conflict is developed throughout the course of both texts and serves to illustrate...

"Uncle Eugene is not a bad man, really. . . . People have problems, people make mistakes" (251). These words are spoken by Kambili, who is trying to explain that the violent Papa is not a “bad man,” but instead a person who has good qualities as...

Chinua Achebe’s novel, Things Fall Apart, is set in Nigeria; the novel examines the clash between traditional African culture, and western ideals by the Igbo tribe, through the protagonist, Okonkwo. Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s...

Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus explores the life of a wealthy Nigerian family with the protagonist Kambili, a young girl who tries to find her own voice in an oppressive society and home. Throughout the novel, the author uses a number of symbols to...

Kambili and Jaja live in a strict, quiet household where everything revolves around their father, Eugene Achike’s, intense religious beliefs and the family’s need to constantly impress him. However, when they visit their Aunty Ifeoma’s house and...

Within any system of oppression, the oppressed, once they realize their treatment is a type of oppression, oftentimes have the impulse to resist. This resistance, sometimes exceptionally dangerous, often bucked by popular opinion and those who...

Both Male Daughters and Female Husbands by Ifi Amadiume and Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Adichie discuss the situation of women in post-colonial Nigeria. Amadiume studies the woman’s function in Nnobi, a village in Southeastern Nigeria, and...

Every culture has unique social tradition placed upon their ancestors for many generations. These social constraints force their people to adhere to the same set of boundaries because it is deemed as proper and acceptable. These constraints often...

Religious Deception The primary purpose of religion is to promote morality and peace within its followers, and its fundamental principles are based on the spread of such peace in the hopes of unity. However, author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie...

Prejudice or alienation is almost always a theme, whether a prominent one or a minor one, within a work of literature. Art is about the human condition, and the human condition only significant because of struggle; a blessed life does not make a...

Four braids wrap around the cover of Americanah, binding the stories and experiences of race within. Stories of realising one’s own race and how it changes your mobility in different places. Stories of understanding power. In Americanah, Adichie...

In Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, navigating the American establishment as an African immigrant is a constant struggle for Ifemelu and others like her. Ifemelu soon starts to experience that the power in America is held not by the few,...

In the essay, “Rethinking the African Diaspora: Global Dynamics,” Ruth Simmons Hamilton writes that, “those who have a strong connection to - and sense of - Africa as homeland often form networks with others who share in this, building alliances...

Many feminists deem sex-positive sex education necessary in order to promote safe, consensual, and healthy sex habits in adolescents that will leave an effect that lasts a lifetime. In the novel Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, however,...

As the world moved through time, the African people have as well. This movement may be categorized into three different sections: Antiquity, the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, and the New Diaspora. Each of these specific pieces are also characterized...

Adichie’s collection of short stories, The Thing Around Your Neck, is a powerful testimony of Nigerian culture as resonated within each and every Nigerian in their homeland and in America. Intertwined with several aspects of culture, she explores...

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s The Thing Around Your Neck follows Akunna, a young Nigerian immigrant, as she adjusts to life in America. While there she begins a relationship with a white man who is eerily fascinated by African culture, and encounters...

Both George Orwell and Chimamanda Adichie have lived in and experienced colonization or a post-colonial environment first hand. Orwell served with the Imperialist police in Burma in the 1920s, before leaving this post due to an immense sense of...