Feminism Is Not Hot

She is an influential writer and thinker, and one of the leading global feminist voices. I first read Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s debut novel, Purple Hibiscus. But she was thrust into the global literary scene with her second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, which won various awards and was about the Biafran war in her homeland Nigeria.

Her TEDx talk, The Danger of A Single Story, was another powerful piece questioning the foreign gaze and stereotypes of life in Africa and other "developing countries" both in media and literature.

Her essay, We Should All Be Feminist, is a bestseller and has seen countries like Sweden immediately take it up in schools - every 16-year-old high school student was given a copy.

From confronting racism to sexism, Adichie weaves words and asks tough questions in ways that challenge one to think and relearn.

Her new short book, Dear Ijeawele, Or A Feminist Manifesto In Fifteen Suggestions, is an extension of a letter she wrote to a friend on how to raise a feminist child.

In this article, Adichie recounts how her work in feminism has exposed different kinds of hostility and discusses exclusion within feminism. But she also gives her ideas of what feminism means to her:

“This idea of feminism as a party to which only a select few people get to come: this is why so many women, particularly women of color, feel alienated from mainstream western academic feminism. Because, don’t we want it to be mainstream? For me, feminism is a movement for which the end goal is to make itself no longer needed. I think academic feminism is interesting in that it can give a language to things.”

In this article, the writer interrogates the use of her work in fashion collections and pop music, and Adichie responds to the limitation of these actions while emphasizing the subversion in getting her feminist writing into this arena. The piece looks at unfair expectations set for women, whether those mean being a mother of girls, having "African hair" or resisting Trump.