Americanah
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2013)
“A Nigerian woman moves to America and discovers that race is not something you are born with — it is something America assigns to you.”
At a Glance
Ifemelu, a young Nigerian woman, immigrates to the United States for college and builds a life while maintaining a long-distance relationship with her childhood sweetheart Obinze. America forces her to confront race for the first time — she wasn't 'Black' in Nigeria. She becomes a successful blogger writing about race through an outsider's eyes, dates an African-American man and then a wealthy white man, and eventually returns to Lagos, where Obinze — now married and wealthy — still waits for her, impossibly.
Read full summary →Why This Book Matters
Won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction in 2013. One of the most significant novels about race in America written in the 21st century — and the one with the most unusual authority: a non-American Black woman who can see American race from outside the categories Americans take for granted. Often taught alongside Ta-Nehisi Coates's Between the World and Me as complementary perspectives on American Blackness.
Diction Profile
Mixed — novelistic narration shifts between warm and analytic; blog posts are deliberately direct and aphoristic; dialogue is character-specific and often code-switches between registers
Moderate