Beyond the Single Story: Black Futures and Feminist Critique in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s The Visit

Abstract

This paper analyzes Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s The Visit (2021) as an example of Afrofuturist and Africanfuturist fiction that uses speculative storytelling to critique gendered power. It examines how a Nigerian dystopian satire can challenge assumptions about patriarchy by imagining a society where women hold institutional power and men face the same moral policing, economic control, and social expectations usually imposed on women. The paper uses close reading informed by feminist theories, including Judith Butler’s performativity, bell hooks’s critique of domestic roles, Sara Ahmed’s idea of the “feminist killjoy,” and Virginia Woolf’s reflections on creativity as well as African feminist approaches from Nanjala Nyabola and Sylvia Tamale that emphasize local context and histories. The analysis finds that The Visit uses satire and inversion not to propose an easy solution or utopia, but to reveal how gendered domination depends on social norms, respectability politics, and internalized beliefs. It also emphasizes how the story’s Nigerian socio-political context reshapes feminist theories commonly applied to speculative fiction. Instead of offering a neat resolution, the story leaves readers with unsettling questions about their own complicity in systems of inequality. The paper concludes that Adichie’s work demonstrates the power of speculative fiction to expose social hierarchies, disrupt stereotypes about African societies, and encourage critical reflection necessary for imagining more equitable futures.