Africa and Its Representation: Pan-Africanism and the African Renaissance in the literature of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Abstract

During a long time, whenever Africa was talked about, it was described as a continent in which misery prevailed and that was doomed to failure. This belief is the result of a single promoted history from, especially, the West that has stereotyped the African continent. Literature, which stablishes dialogues with historical movements and represents societies, has contributed to deconstruct this single narrative, especially with the relevance, which is only increasing, that African authors and narratives have reached. In that sense, the following paper analyzes the interaction between Pan-African and African Renaissance movements in the works Half of a Yellow Sun and Americanah, respectively. To accomplish that, it is used an inductive procedure and a review of literature that presents theoretical assumptions of these two movements developed in different periods: the Pan-Africanism in the 19th and 20th centuries and the African Renaissance starting in the last decade of the 20th century and going until contemporaneity. In the development of this paper, it was noted that the works of Adichie present nuances of both aforesaid movements and that the author deconstructs the stereotype of a single history of Africa by representing the complexity of conditions faced by the population.