Quick Write
How is the class going so far? What do you like? What can be improved?
“The Danger of a Single Story” by Chimamanda Adichie.
To quote a CNN article on the Danger of a Single Story:
Nigerian author Chimamanda Adichie believes in the power of stories, and warns that hearing only one about a people or nation leads to ignorance. She says the truth is revealed by many tales.
She illustrates this with a story about coming to the United States, as a middle-class daughter of a professor and an administrator, and meeting her college roommate. Adichie says that her roommate’s “default position toward me, as an African, was a kind of patronizing, well-meaning, pity. My roommate had a single story of Africa. A single story of catastrophe.”
Adichie also tells how growing up in Nigeria reading only American and English children’s books made her deaf to her authentic voice. As a child, she wrote about such things as blue-eyed white children eating apples, thinking brown skin and mangos had no place in literature. That changed as she discovered African writers, particularly the Nigerian Chinua Achebe.
Write for three minutes on what stood out to you.
In small groups discuss the TED Talk and look for:
- What is she arguing?
- What appeals does she rely on?
- Is she persuasive?
Homework
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