The Danger of a Single Story Flashcards
Chronological order of the text
Illustrates how she used to be close minded but then through exposure to different viewpoints is now more open minded
This is also highlighted by the temporal markers throughout the text
‘Danger of a single story’
- Foreshadowing and metaphor
- The cautionary tone creates a sense of foreshadowing for how harmful it is to have a single story
- The metaphor ‘story’ exposes stereotypes for what they are - fiction
Anecdotal speech
- Makes the audience believe that her points are valid because she has first-hand experience of the issues she is talking about
- Allows her to describe how she herself has fallen victim to having a single story, showing how easy it is to have this happen, but also how she has overcome this, showing that anybody can do it
‘Although I think four is closer to the truth’
- Ethos and humour
- Establishes her credibility due to her honestly as well as her likeability
‘my poor mother was obligated to read’
- Pathos - humour
- Establishes credibility by making her more likeable and relatable
‘all my characters were white and blue-eyed, they played in the snow, they ate apples, and they talked alot about the weather’
- Listing
- Highlights how monotonous all of the books she read were as a child, showing how close minded the world was making her at the time
‘We didn’t have snow, we ate mangoes, and we never talked about the weather’
- Juxtaposition and antithesis to her description of Western literature
- Emphasises how different her reality was to the books she was reading yet how she had still developed a single picture of what literature should be like
‘What this demonstrates, I think, is how impressionable and vulnerable we are in the face of a story’
- Emotive language and use of a collective pronoun
- Shifts the tone to become more serious to show the true risks of a single story
- She starts to use collective pronouns rather than personal pronouns to tell the audience that everybody is at risk of developing stereotypes
‘They opened up new worlds for me’
- Hyperbole and metaphor
- Highlights how all stories are empowering as they offer a unique perspective, the danger is to have an exposure to only one type of story
‘it saved me from having a single story of what books are’
- ‘Saved’ juxtaposes ‘danger’
- Shows that you can challenge the danger of a single story by widening your scope of the content you consume
‘“Finish your food! Don’t you know? People like Fide’s family have nothing.”’
- Reported and direct speech
- The humour and relatability makes Adiche more likeable and believeable, which engages the reader and improves her credibility
- It also shows how we promote stereotypes everyday in our casual language, showing it is a systemic issue
‘Their poverty was my single story of them’
- Self critique - logos
- The fact that this is said after her explaining the danger of a single story shows us that everybody is susceptible to a close minded view
‘Tribal music’ and ‘Mariah Carey’
- Juxtaposition of cultures and allusion to stereotypically Western pop songs
- The contrast shows how different stereotypes truly are to reality using the allusion
‘my roomate had a single story of Africa: a single story of catastrophe’
- Parallel sentence structure
- Shows the roomates limited view as she believes Africa is synonymous to catastrophe and how there is an apparent relationship between Africa and catastrophe
’ there was no possibility of Africans being similar to her in any way, no possibility of feelings more complex than pity’
- Anaphora
- Further highlights how close minded her roomate is due to her single story of Africa, with the absoluteness of ‘no possibility’ accentuating this
‘There were endless stories of Mexicans as people who…’
- Hyberpole
- Emphasises the severity of the problem of stereotyping
‘fleecing’, ‘sneaking’, ‘being arrested’ and ‘going to work’, rolling up tortillas in the marketplace, smoking, laughing’
- Criminal lexical choice juxtaposes everyday activity
- Further shows how stereotypes are nothing more than a ‘story’, and improves her credibility as she is self-critisising
The everyday activities are also an asyndeton, showing how the list is endless
‘I had bought into the single story’
- ‘Bought into’ is a phrasal verb and a metaphor
- Creates the sense that it is almost a choice and that you do not need to follow stereotypes, showing that there is hope to become more open minded
- It makes it seem almost like an easy, addictive thing which you need to eschew
A phrasal verb is a verb followed by another article, usally a preposition
‘one thing, as only one thing, over and over again’
- Repetition
- Shows how Adichie believes this is a systemic and ongoing issue in society
‘Stories matter. Many stories matter’
- Short sentences and repetition
- Emphasises the importance of the message she is trying to promote
Quote from Alice Walker
- Allusion
- Adds authority, especially with an example, to her message of avoiding a narrow view of a place/people
‘When we reject the single story, when we realise that there is never a single story about any place’
- Repetition of ‘single story’, including from the start of the text
- This encapsulates her message and what she is trying to avoid, the metaphorical ‘single story’
- ‘Never’ shows the absolute nature of her message
- Collective pronouns show that anybody can become open minded
‘a kind of paradise was regained’ and ‘we regain a kind of paradise’
- Repetition of ‘paradise’ and juxtaposition of ‘paradise’ to ‘danger’
- Shows how stories can be empowering if told from an open minded perspective, and how to be liberated from a single story is one of the most profound luxuries as a human
