Dis-Covered. Book Covers and the Representation of Female Narratives in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah and We Should All Be Feminists

In the Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Website, maintained by Daria Tunca of the University of Liège, it is possible to find the most complete and updated list of translations of Adichie’s books. A note explains, ‘Adichie’s work has been translated into more than thirty languages’, showing how in the last sixteen years the writer has entered the international literary scenario, neither just as a member of the so-called third generation of Nigerian female writers, nor just as a feminist writer trying to show the limitations of a patriarchal society. Thanks to her books, but also to her ability to use several forms of communications (TED talks, lectures, blogging), Adichie can nowadays be considered a transnational author, whose words can reach heterogeneous audiences and whose narrations can be addressed to very different reading publics through translation. Literary translation is surely one of the most effective ways to make narrations circulate among different linguistic, social and cultural environments, but the publication of a literary translation involves aspects that go beyond the act of repurposing a text into alien languages and cultures. As commodities, and not just as works of art, books are subject to marketing choices that can affect the ways in which readers are confronted with the narratives they presented. Drawing on these premises, the article aims at presenting a general overview of the book covers of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah and We Should All Be Feminists, analysing, comparatively, some of the editions in the source language (English) and some translations into Italian and Portuguese. In so doing, it intends to address the role of paratexts in conveying and/ or affecting the representations of African women’s narratives in some of the literary panoramas that host Adichie’s books.