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Chimamanda Adichie's The Danger Of A Single Story

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Chimamanda Adichie’s TED talk on “The Danger of a Single Story” argues that Western culture creates a mythology surrounding Africa as a starkly different place than Western culture, an idea which Chinua Achebe echoes in his essay, “An Image of Africa,” in order to endorse the need for multiple stories to combat stereotypes. For example, Adichie mentions how her American roommate in college was astonished to learn that Adichie spoke English very well and that she knew how to operate a stove. In pointing this out, Adichie reveals the construction of the narrative of certain expectations of what it means to be African, which the roommate implies to mean a lack of knowledge of operating a stove and to not be able to speak English. The roommate
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In her TED talk called “The danger of a single story” Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, speaks about the negative effects, single stories can have on a certain people. A single story is created when the same discourse is being repeated over an over again in books, TV shows or in the news. The single story creates a stereotypical, one sided perception of a group of people. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie tells a story about how she, came to believe a single story in her childhood. When she was a child she read many American and English books, about people, with whom she had very little in common.

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Before she met her, Adichie’s roommate, felt enormous pity for her and did not believe the two of them could be similar in any way simply because she was African. Adichie questions how things would have been different on their first encounter had her roommate heard of all the positive influential people making a difference in Nigeria. The undeniable truth is, a single story has the power to both deprive and empower people. In “The Danger of a Single Story”, Adichie captivates her audience and convinces them that many stories matter.

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Effects of Single Stories and Post-colonialism The power of a single story is that it can make us believe that the world is as the story tells it, without questioning the authors who are constructing the narrative. According to Adichie’s “The Danger of a Single Story” speech, That is how to create a single story, show a people as one thing, as only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become, it is impossible to talk about the single story without talking about power. Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person.

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