Narrative ethics and alterity in Adichie’s novel Americanah

Abstract

In her article “Narrative Ethics and Alterity in Adichie’s Novel Americanah” Nora Berning analyses Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novel through the lens of a narrative ethics of alterity. Focusing on the notion of alterity, Berning argues that a specific turn-of-the-century ethics emerges in contemporary fictions of migration in general and in intercultural novels in particular. An ethical genre in its own right, such twenty-first century fictions as Americanah generate a particular kind of ethical knowledge that revolves around questions of identity and alterity and around individual and collective perceptions of self and other. By addressing the interplay of “the ethics of the told” and “the ethics of the telling” in the novel, Berning contributes to a conceptualization of narrative ethics of alterity in fictions of migration highlighting their ethical and political value in an age of migration and globalization.