“To Be from the Country of People Who Gave”: National Allegory and the United States of Adichie’s Americanah

Current debates about Afropolitan literature alternately value it for challenging western stereotypes about Africa and critique it for embracing western capitalism. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah (2013) complicates these debates by articulating a Nigerian dream that, while imbued with the class mobility of its American counterpart, delinks the dollar from intimately experienced, ongoing histories of white supremacism.