A postcolonial dish: food and cultural identity in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s The Thing around Your Neck

The article consists of a bibliographical research in which the short story The Thing around Your Neck, from the homonymous book written by the Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2009) is analyzed through the theoretical framework related to the themes of cultural heritage and identity in a postcolonial context. These themes are aligned to the author’s descriptions of food, typical recipes and commensality. The methodology is defined as a literary analysis developed through comparative literature. The article is structured in three sections, being the first of them a brief approach of food as a relational phenomenon and as a system of communication through the theoretical framework of Barthes (2013) and Goldstein (2018). The second section discusses food in literature as a tool to add sensory details, to provide realism and to emphasize emotional states or cultural practices, according to Nicholson (1987) and Fitzpatrick and Boyce (2017). The third section analyzes how Adichie explores food as a symbolic tool to express postcolonial issues and to highlight cross-cultural identities in the mentioned narratives, based on works of Ngongkum (2014), Tunca (2010) and Ifeoluwa Mary (2022).