ABSTRACT
According to many scholars, globalization, modern technologies, and some recent geopolitical changes are leading the contemporary society to a new paradigm commonly known as Transmodernity. Devoted to their role of representing and foreseeing social changes, writers are looking for a new way of expressing the complexities of this change of paradigm. Among the contemporary community of writers who are responding to it, we find Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Raised both in Nigeria and the United States, Adichie easily portrays the intermingling of cultures and the barriers that transnational characters must break to transcend the Postmodern outsider-insider status. In an era of assumed plurality which fails to achieve female equality, Adichie makes use of the simulacra character of the new paradigm to discuss women’s genealogy and identity formation in an attempt to restore women’s autonomy and subjectivity. It is in her collection of short stories The Thing around Your Neck that Adichie offers a wider reflection on contemporary transculturality and a greater revision of feminist ethics. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate how Adichie’s short stories collection, and in particular, the narratives of “The American Embassy” and “Jumping Monkey Hill” and the various levels of ‘trans-‘ which articulate them, offer an excellent example of the changes that are being observed in the current cultural paradigm, contributing to conforming and defining it.
