The Danger Of A Single Story By Adichie Summary

Lacking a wider variety of stories on any given topic can lead to dangerous misconceptions and casual racism. In her TED Talk, The Danger of a Single Story, Ms. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, award winning Nigerian novelist and public speaker, uses personal encounters with the effects of a single story to normalize her experiences with her audiences so that they may internalize them and act upon them easier. Ms. Adichie's use of pathos, as well as her comedic tone and understanding of who her audience is makes it significantly easier for her to accomplish the aforementioned goal.

The short stories, “Turned”, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and “The Good Corn”, by H.E Bates provide strong examples of how the representation of characters influence’s the reader’s perception of a text. Both stories depict similar characters: a middle-aged, childless wife, her husband and an 18-year old girl who works for them. They are both about a similar situation: man cheats on wife with girl and girl falls pregnant. However, the author’s of the text are from very different backgrounds and this is reflected in their stories. Although there are many similarities between “The Good Corn” and “Turned”, the values reflected in these stories, their resolutions and the reader’s perception of them are vastly different due to the contexts of

Chimamanda Adichie is a novelist and a narrator who delivered a persuasive speech on what she calls; "The Danger of a Single Story" but in reality what it means is the danger of stereotyping. Dictionary.com defines Stereotype as “A generalization usually exaggerated or oversimplified and often offensive, that is used to describe or distinguish a group.” Adichie delivered her presentation on a very well-known website called Ted.com, with one objective in mind, to prevail upon everyone to share their personal stories with the world so that there no longer is a “single story” defining any one person or group. Although, Adichie is aware that the damage that has been already created may take some time to undo, she felt that

In July 2009, at a TED conference, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, a Nigerian author, gave a stunning speech about “the Danger of a Single Story”. In her speech, she mentioned about negative consequences happening when people tend to form stereotypes based on a single story, the one-sided argument. The single story blindfolds our eyes and prevents us from seeing the complexity, diversity, and similarities that construct our world, just as Adichie says “these negative stories is to flatten my experience and overlook the many other stories that formed me” (12:56). Listening to all her own personal experience and argument, I have become fully convinced and also see myself reflected in her stories. The single story can cause underlying and harmful impacts not only on personal issues but also on the global scale.

A single story is a limited viewpoint. A single story reduces cultures and people into a simple stereotype.

The Danger of a Single Story - A speech that was said by Chimamanda Adichie that inspired me to write this report.

One of the obstacles that African American writers had to face during the eighteen and nineteen hundreds was effectively communicating with white audiences. The white audience ranged from supporters of abolition and black rights to past or present slaveholders. Authors had to reach southern and northern audiences and have an appearance of humbleness to attract some and action to attract others. One of the methods that was used to make their writings attractive across audiences was metaphor. This literary device allowed them to code meaning to present information in the dosage that each type of audience needed. This paper will explore “the loophole of retreat” in Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and “the Veil” in W.E.B.

This Ted Talk served as a basis for all our essays. Chimamanda Adichie is an African writer who is from Nigeria, but studied in America. In this talk, there is a lot of information about, what she calls, the curse of a single story. This means that if you only have one story about a certain subject, then you have only a limited view of it. Adichie talks about how dangerous this can be, because you are perceiving something hat is most likely more complex and has more information to it, as something that is simple and has one view towards it. I used this to compare my main topic of gap years to. I used

Allison states, “We longed to be able to rent one of the rafts…you could get on the beach. But my stepfather insisted all that stuff was listed at robbery rates and cursed the men who tried to tempt us with it” (Allison 119). As this whole essay is a personal anecdote, this is just a glimpse of a specific incident in her life where you can see the lower class income seeping through. This example strengthens this essay because it allows the reader to see Allison reflect on her past, and provide more evidence about her personal context, meaning her background. The author appeals to emotion in stating, “I was afraid to take my lover home with me because of what I might see in her face once she had spent some time with my aunt…” (Allison 118). Throughout the whole essay, Allison tries to make the readers feel sympathetic towards her situation. Allison includes this quote above within the first couple of sentences to clearly state how she feels towards this situation. This keeps the reader intrigued, and in a way makes the reader nervous for what is yet to come. As the reader continues reading, she appeals to emotion by provoking the reader to hope that everything works out in the end. Overall, Dorothy Allison effectively secured her point to the readers using her own personal experiences and appealing to

A person’s capability is often limitless when his or her heart is drawn towards a certain matter. In her memoir, There is No Me Without You, novelist and journalist, Melissa Fay Greene gives a candid insight on one woman’s odyssey to rescue Africa’s children. Greene successfully creates a sympathetic tone in order to stress the urgencies of the conditions for children in Africa living with AIDs and the difficult lives that they face through the usage of rhetorical questions and pathos. Similarly, irony is used to emphasize the ingratitude of the children despite Haregewoin’s best efforts take care of them. Throughout her memoir, Greene educates readers on a life beyond their narrow perspectives and walk them through a world of hurt and pain

Once there was a woman who told a story. However, she had more than just an entertaining tale to tell. She chose common images that everyone would understand, and she wrapped her story around them, and in this way she was able to teach the people . . .

In Adichie’s TED talk, she tells how the “single story” is very dangerous thing. Adichie gets this across by telling her experiences receiving a “single story” by her mother. Adichie’s Mother had told her over many years that there was this boy that was coming to live with them. This little boy was part of a very poor family, Adichie’s mother had said to her, “ Eat the rest of your food, you know there are some people in this world just like the little boy that don’t have this food and are starving.” Now Adichie had always looked at this little boy being poor, when she had met this little boy he was able to make many things and seemed very happy and content with where he was in life. Now if this little boy looked at his own life the way that

In the speech, the Danger of a Single Story the writer, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie tells us the dangers of believing just one thing about a stereo type. In the speech Adichie repeats the phrase ‘single story’ as I think it is very important to her and by saying it repetitively she gets it to stick in peoples minds. I think the main point of the speech is to tell people the dangers of believing just one story about a country, a person or a religion etc. and to see past the stereotype we can be tricked into believing and instead see past it to see for example the person for who they are, for example, she as an eight year old girl believed a single story about their houseboy, Fide she says, ‘The only thing my mother told us about him was that his family was very poor... when I didn’t finish my dinner, my mother would say, “Finish your food! Don’t you know? People like Fide’s family have nothing.” So I felt enormous pity for Fide’s family. Then one Saturday we went to his village to visit, and his mother showed us a beautifully patterned basket made of dyed raffia that his brother had made. It had not occurred to me that anybody in his family could actually make something. All I had heard about them was how poor they were, so that it had become impossible for me to see them as anything else but poor.’ This was her single story of Fide’s family, because all her mother had told her was that they were poor she did not see past that and had no idea that anyone poor was capable of creating something so beautiful.

Storytelling helps other people to emotionally connect themselves to the author so that they know they are not the only ones who are experiencing a painful or exciting experience, and are able to share the same emotions. It often helps other people to know what they should do in order to get over it when it comes to a painful experience. Maya Angelou’s I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings explores the life of Maya Angelou and the struggles she has been throughout her childhood to her adulthood. Richard Wagemese’s Indian Horse explores the life of Saul Indian Horse and the struggles he has been through after departing from his family. The power of storytelling can unfold questions which ask the audience of how and why are the events are unfold the

From the TED Talk video “The Danger of a Single Story,” I think that the speaker Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie wanted to tell us that we need to read more and know different stories about one place because there are more than one story exist. We should not judge other without knowing themselves. Furthermore, she said that we should not easily believe everything we heard from media because they only give us one impression. I especially felt close to her when she described how she felt after she realized her American roommate teetered her as African not Nigerian. (4:13) Moreover, she had only a single story about Africa. (4:49) Those paragraph remind me when I was in college in New York, my American classmates did not know the differences between Japanese and Chinese or