Writing “so raw and true”: Blogging in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s <i>Americanah</i>

Abstract

This essay aims at tracing the intersection between literary production and multimedia textuality in the case of postcolonial writing through an analysis of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s recent novel Americanah (2013). Here the main character Ifemelu, after leaving her native Lagos to study in the US, becomes famous as a blogger on racial issues from the point of view of a non-American black. Starting from Sandra Ponzanesi’s The Postcolonial Cultural Industry, the analysis of the novel takes into account recent debates on the public role of postcolonial writers, as the blog reflects Adichie’s own role in contemporary media and situates the novel in the global landscape of Afropolitanism and its predicaments. Blog entries inhabit the novel from its early pages, and blogging intersects fiction and contaminates it with social commentary. With its interweaving of creative writing and opinion making, novel and blog, Americanah comments on the public role of the writer and its viral exposure, offering a poignant example of the mutation of narrative forms in the information age.

Keywords

• Americanah
• Blogging
• Literature
• Postcolonial
• Afropolitanism