Construção da identidade feminina em Purple hibiscus, de Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: teorias pós-coloniais e feminismo negro

Abstract

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has been acclaimed by the critics e academy for her writing and the current issues approached on her novels. Thus, as on her other works, Purple Hibiscus is a novel that can bring to the surface a variety of discussions about ancestry, colonized people, blackness and the women’s role inside the African society. Noticing the productive dialog between postcolonialism and feminism, this work is going to, at a first moment, discuss how the Nigerian identity, especially the feminine, is built having as a premise the violence suffered by the African people during the colonization process. For this purpose, we will use the studies about postcolonial and identity, having as theoretical support writes such as Bonnici (2006), Hall (2003), Glissant (2005) and Fanon (2005). Percepting that feminism is a very presente issue in Adichie’s work and, in the novel we are studying in this work we can find strong characters, such as Beatrice and Ifeoma. In this way, we aim to show the complexity of the characters’ identity mentioned previously from the perspective of black feminism, having as the main goal to show that the characters in the novel were not reduced to manacheistic stereotypes, a representation that is so current in the western literature. It is also observed that the racism issue and exclusion for White feminists during decades compelled black women to resignify the moviment and build answers and a new way of fighting more appropriate to their reality and the distinctive oppression they suffered. In order to deepen on the discussions about this theme, we used black feminists such as Audre Lorde (1983), Angela Davis (2016), Ogunyemi (1988), Nnaemeka (2003), Kolawole (1997), among others.