Texts, talks and tailoring: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s fashion politics

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Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Sandra Mayer for inspiring me to develop this project, and to John Masterson for his helpful comments on an earlier draft.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. In April 2015, Adichie featured in Time magazine’s annual list of The 100 Most Influential People (Jones 2015).

2. Although Adichie’s speech was first given in December 2012 (Adichie 2014, p. 3), its recording (Adichie 2013a) was published online in April 2013.

3. Adichie was questioned about the importance of hair in Americanah in interviews with, for instance, The Observer (Kellaway 2013), Channel 4 News (Snow 2013) and The Rumpus (Jones 2014).

4. Adichie splits her time between Nigeria and the USA (Brockes 2014).

5. Fiona McCade (2014), for instance, argues that Beyoncé’s feminism is tokenistic because she sexualises her body to sell records.

6. Another controversy arose when Adichie rejected the label of Afropolitan writer (Adichie 2013c). Afropolitanism represents a cosmopolitan, transcultural and transnational phenomenology of Africanness (Gikandi 2011, p. 9, Eze 2014, p. 241), which, as Miriam Pahl argues, is applicable to Adichie’s writing (Pahl 2015, p. 75). Adichie (2013c) herself, however, finds it annoying because she feels happily African, and does not see the need for a new term to define her identity.

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Matthew Lecznar

Matthew Lecznar is a doctoral researcher in the School of English at the University of Sussex, UK. His research explores the legacy of the Nigerian Civil War (1967–1970) in different forms of textual, audio-visual and material culture.