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Black Lives: Not A Single Story, Jane Horovitz

Honors College

This thesis explores depictions of Black lives in America through consideration of journalism, along with novels and plays by 20th-and 21st-century African American writers. It looks, in particular, at Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s 2013 novel Americanah and her famous TED Talk, “The Danger of a Single Story.” In the latter, she warns against telling a single story about Africans, one that often involves pain, trauma, and poverty; Adichie’s warning is also especially relevant to a critique of stereotypical conceptualizations of African American suffering. Americanah provides a new Black narrative and a new definition of Blackness, one that tells a …