Americanah

Multi-generational immigrant novel about identity and belonging in the Anglophone world — Smith is more formally playful; Adichie is more architecturally controlled, but both use humor as a vehicle for serious argument

The Black outsider using his visibility-as-invisibility to see American race clearly — Ellison goes surreal and symbolic; Adichie stays realist; both are about what America does to a self that arrived with a different one

Indian immigrant family in America across two generations — where Adichie is politically direct, Lahiri is intimate and domestic, but both track the specific costs of hyphenated identity

Nigerian-American narrator's walking meditation through New York — Cole is more interior and formally modernist, Adichie more socially wide-angle; both are Nigerian writers using the outsider's eye on America

The African-American experience of racial assignment from inside — a useful comparison to Americanah's immigrant perspective; together they show two different sides of being Black in America

Black beauty standards and the internalization of white aesthetic norms — Morrison is more formally experimental; Adichie more novelistically linear; both interrogate what happens when a culture's beauty ideal excludes its own members