Negotiating Silenced Histories and Fragmented Selves A Cultural, Subaltern, and Psychoanalytic Reading of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Fiction
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: This article offers a critical examination of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s major novels through the combined lenses of Subaltern Theory, Cultural Theory, and Psychoanalysis. Adichie’s works, notably Purple Hibiscus, Half of a Yellow Sun, and Americanah, illuminate the contested terrains of postcolonial identity, gendered subalternity, and fractured subjectivity within the Nigerian and diasporic contexts. The analysis foregrounds how Adichie negotiates cultural memory, colonial violence, and gendered silences, while dramatizing psychic conflicts emerging from the clash between tradition and modernity. Drawing on theorists such as Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha, Frantz Fanon, and Sigmund Freud, this study demonstrates that Adichie’s narrative strategies destabilize monolithic constructions of identity and nation, giving voice to historically marginalized experiences. Her fiction emerges as a complex site of cultural translation, affective negotiation, and political critique, offering nuanced interventions in debates around subalternity, hybridity, and the politics of memory.
Author: Vaishali Biradar
Institution: Government of Gujarat
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W4413456177