From Subjugation to Rebellion: a Postcolonial Reading of Identity and Resistance in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Novels

Abstract

This article offers a comparative postcolonial reading of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Purple Hibiscus (2003), Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), and Americanah (2013), arguing that her fiction represents identity as a contested process produced through encounters with coloniality, patriarchy, religion, ethnicity, war, race, migration, and cultural memory. Drawing on Frantz Fanon's account of colonial psychology, Edward Said's critique of imperial representation, Homi K. Bhabha's concepts of hybridity and ambivalence, Stuart Hall's understanding of cultural identity as a process of becoming, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's concern with voice and representation, and Ngugi wa Thiong'o's analysis of linguistic and cultural domination, the article traces a movement from subjugation toward forms of individual and collective resistance. In Purple Hibiscus, coloniality is reproduced within the domestic sphere through Eugene Achike's authoritarian Catholicism, patriarchal violence, and rejection of indigenous cultural practices; Kambili and Jaja gradually develop alternative forms of agency through speech, mobility, cultural encounter, and dissent. Half of a Yellow Sun shifts the analysis to the Nigerian-Biafran War, where ethnic identity, nationalism, violence, gender, and historical memory become sites of struggle. Americanah extends the inquiry into transnational space, showing how Ifemelu's encounters with American racial formations transform her understanding of Blackness, Africanness, gender, language, and belonging. The article contends that Adichie's distinctive contribution to postcolonial fiction lies in representing resistance not as a simple reversal of domination but as an unfinished process of reclaiming voice, memory, embodiment, and interpretive authority