Sorellanza e resistenza

Pratiche di ‘genealogia narrativa’ in Second Class Citizen di Buchi Emecheta e Americanah di Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Abstract

This article analyzes the narrative genealogy connecting Second Class Citizen (1974) by Buchi Emecheta and Americanah (2013) by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. At the core of this study is the concept of ‘narrative sisterhood’ as a form of literary continuity through which Black women writers create symbolic spaces of resistance, recognition, and collective memory across generations and diasporic experiences. Adichie’s novel does not merely parallel Emecheta’s work, but rather reworks and transforms themes already present in nuce in Emecheta’s narrative universe. Through the figures of Adah and Ifemelu, the essay explores how diasporic Black female subjectivities are shaped, on the one hand, by migration, racialization, and gender oppression, and, on the other hand, by the search for belonging and affirmation. Particular attention is devoted to writing as a transformative and political act: Adah’s manuscript and Ifemelu’s blog become narrative spaces in which silence is transformed into speech and marginality into self-definition. The article further examines how bodily violence, reproductive control, racism, and linguistic displacement affect the protagonists’ processes of subjectivation. Drawing on the theories of bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Angela Davis, Stuart Hall, Homi K. Bhabha, and Edward Said, this study emphasizes that writing is a practice of reconstruction and resistance.