Gender Discrimination in Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus and Americanah: A Critical Discourse Analysis

Abstract

The thematic analysis of race, gender, culture, and postcolonial identity in the novels Americanah (2013) and Purple Hibiscus (2003) by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has attracted a great deal of scholarly attention. Nevertheless, the extant literature has largely operated at the level of literary and thematic criticism, using language as a clear medium to express themes, rather than as the main location where power relations are constructed, negotiated, and contested in a discursive manner. Although this approach has its value, it does not consider the linguistic processes that actually facilitate the discrimination and identity being performed in the texts. This paper attempts to fill this gap by using the three-dimensional model of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) by Norman Fairclough to investigate the systematic construction of gender discrimination and identity in Americanah and Purple Hibiscus. The discussion dwells upon the specific passages where power relations become the most evident, as the scene of patriarchal authority and silence in Purple Hibiscus and the scene of racial negotiations and the life of immigrants in Americanah. This paper shows that in her fiction, Adichie not only addresses the issue of discrimination but also actually discusses it on the discursive level. According to the findings, this paper will present several recommendations regarding the next research on Americanah and Purple Hibiscus in particular. The comparison of certain discursive characteristics in the two novels is the issue that deserves further inquiry. Researchers might even study differences in the effects of silence in each text as a forced submission in Purple Hibiscus and as a strategic nondisclosure in Americanah and what it tells us about the different contexts and interests of their novels.

Keywords: Critical Discourse Analysis, Americanah, Purple Hibiscus, discrimination, gender, patriarchy