Perspective Chapter: The Female Body on the Phallocentric Altar – Appropriations of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Feminist Manifesto

Abstract

This chapter reflects on how Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, in multifarious ways, projects and confronts a nuanced (and blatant) exaltation of maleness over femaleness in her fiction. Adichie’s fiction mainly presents (Black) women as constantly living in patriarchal and repressive spaces characterised by multifaceted discriminations, marginalisation, abuse, commodification and censorship, all of which are protracted by the notion that femaleness should live in total subjection to maleness. To instantiate her opposition to this practice, Adichie accords authoritative roles and voices to her female characters, despite their living under repressive and constraining spaces. Reliant on the postcolonial feminist theory, this chapter analyses some of Adichie’s prose works, namely; Purple Hibiscus, Half of a Yellow Sun, and The Thing Around Your Neck to foreground appropriation of her feminist manifesto. The analysis positions Adichie’s prose as one that falls within the ambits of contemporary literary works that project women confronting and contesting hydra-headed manifestations of patriarchal repression, its attendant practices and ideologies, and gender inequality. Adichie’s prose is herein appraised as a literary space within which varied socio-cultural trajectories and gender inequalities in particular are expressed in a postcolonial context.