Teaching Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah in Ireland: “If you don’t understand, ask questions”

Abstract

Chimamanda Adichie’s Americanah offers a valuable resource for teaching contemporary literature in Ireland. Students respond well to the novel’s direct invitation to consider racialized identities and their contexts, while also engaging clearly and enthusiastically with the novel’s form, its use of voice, and its themes of migration. Using the novel’s direct engagement with Nora Zeale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God and with several important contemporary texts by African Americans, Hayes-Brady considers ways Americanah both reinscribes and disrupts conventions of Black American femininity and its preoccupation with embodiment as it relates to the Black body in American culture, and how the novel presents various gendered and racialized experiences in the world as profoundly embodied. The work’s representations of gender and mobility are particularly relevant for discussions of class and education prompted by the novel. Finally, Hayes-Brady argues that teaching Americanah offers an opportunity for academics in Ireland to reflect on the current status of American studies in the country, where most involved in teaching African American literature are white and secure in their professional positions.