Reading Postcolonial Grief in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s We Should All Be Feminists and Bell Hooks’s Feminism Is for Everybody

Feminist essay writing as a literary and political form has produced some of the most accessible and widely read texts in contemporary critical discourse, and a comparison of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's We Should All Be Feminists and bell hooks's Feminism Is for Everybody reveals how two Black feminist writers from Nigeria and the United States construct feminist arguments for broad popular audiences while situating their politics within specific cultural and historical contexts. This study examined how both texts define feminism, address male readers, and navigate the tension between universal feminist principles and culturally specific applications. A comparative feminist rhetoric methodology drawing on African feminism and intersectionality theory was applied. Adichie's text began as a TED Talk and retains the forms of direct address and personal anecdote that characterise her public intellectual style, while hooks's text is explicitly pedagogical and aimed at demystifying feminist theory for readers outside academic institutions. Both texts are committed to the argument that feminism benefits men as well as women and that feminist politics must be built on everyday lived experience rather than abstract ideology. The analysis revealed that while hooks situates her feminism within American race history and class politics, Adichie grounds hers in the specific social expectations of Igbo Nigerian womanhood. The study recommends this pairing for undergraduate gender studies and feminist literary theory courses at universities across all six geopolitical zones of Nigeria.

Keywords: feminism, Adichie, bell hooks, gender essay, Black feminist theory