High Grade Analysis of Dangers Of A Single Story

so my goal is going to be to yes make you aware of the things that everybody's going to talk about but also the really nuanced subtle ways in which Chanda um crafts language because she is the key to this text her being a writer not only is a huge part of why this is such a beautifully written speech because she is incredibly skilled at what she does but it also means that she is very much speaking to her experience her experience as someone who is Nigerian her experience as someone who creates media content not in the sense of like YouTube or whatever but in the sense of TED talks in the sense of books um in the sense of essays she's written she is very much talking about this issue with the dangers of a single story which

we'll come on to in a second very much as an Insider that's the key thing with a lot of these nxl texts it's like you know is the writer an Insider or an outsid to the topic they are talking about and she is definitely an ins Ider she is Nigerian she is a writer she knows the worlds in which she is writing about firsthand that's a really important thing you want to be talking about in any analytical essays about the dangers of a single story you need to frame the entire speech in her lens her world in addition to the writer the audience and purpose is a really important part of this text because it is one of the few where there is a clear purpose beyond the sort of wishy-washy writing to entertain writing to inform

um it's got a slightly different strong really powerful purpose that is in turn tied in with the audience so the audience is a western audience certainly at the very least you just have to you know take a look at the video footage of her delivering the speech and you can see she's speaking to a very white audience and that is in itself significant because an element of what she's going to go on to talk about in this speech is the sort of uh racial stereo typing that can come as a consequence of the dangers of a single story who the audience are matters here because of their schema and how it differs from the writers she is coming from a place of understanding what it means to not be represented in

literature uh not be to be stereotyped in the news and she is speaking to a group of people Western predominantly white who are very well represented in in literature and who depending like generally speaking um are not stereotyped in the news so they have the audience have an Outsiders perspective on this they aren't writers as well we can presume they might be the odd writer in the audience but you know they aren't all writers in there as well while she is speaking from a place of real personal knowledge and experience they are coming to listen to her because you know they may be aware of these issues isues they might not be coming from no knowledge about this issue but they certainly don't have her level of

knowledge and experience and therefore they're really interested to learn about that um and so she is going to be aware in Her speech of the fact that there is an element of her yes being able to inform her audience but also there's going to be an element of her being able to sort of make a case to them to present an issue to them and argue you know why this is a problem try to persuade them on what we should do about it so on and so forth one of the things I'm really going to be looking at with you over this video is how she does the argue persuade element so it's how does she talk about this issue of you know uh lack of diversity and racial stereotyping within the Western World to people in that world and not make them

really you know defensive or the whole classic of like oh this isn't a problem etc etc so the way that she goes about arguing and persuading is a very classic system that was well I don't know if he invented it but certainly he sort of identified what people were doing and named it and that's Aristotle and he talked about using ethos logos posos to convince someone of your argument now again those terms sound quite complicated probably just because they're Greek I I don't know what language Aristotle spoke but they're actually not it's super straightforward and makes complete sense once you know what they mean so ethos is essentially you arguing who you are and why that gives you the right to be listened to on

this topic so ethos is how essentially you convince your audience that you are worth listening to in the first place the second one logos is appealing to people's logic appealing to their minds so facts statistics just you know arguing your case and then posos is appealing to people's emotions um and what emotions can massively vary I'm going to be really showing you where we see those three and how it helps to persuade our audience of course the other key area that the questions will be on is what the writer's thoughts and feelings are and in the case of the dangers of a single story we've got a few different I would say sort the biggest areas that you the meatest areas you could talk about the first is the

sort of power of literature now I've said literature in particular but she does obviously also talk about the news and the power of the news so you could expand this to like the power of media the Power of stories as per the title but there's definitely an element of like literature in particular books being really powerful as well the other issue she talks about is that limited diversity leads to stereotyping and Prejudice so when we don't have that range of stories out there we end up having to turn to stereotypes and then the third is that it is actually really important to have that diversity and she goes through some reasons why so let's get stuck into the actual analysis then first thing we're going to talk about is

the actual title the danger of a single story this is a really fantastic title for her speech because it beautifully encapsulates everything she wants to say um and therefore we can say it foregrounds everything and we know that because of this metaphor of a single story The reason I'm calling this a metaphor is because there is not literally one story right actually what she's doing is she's using this single story as a metaphor for the lack of diversity within wider literature within the media and so you know we're going to see how she keeps using this metaphor later on the key thing about her use of the word danger is more what it foregrounds about the fact that she's she's aiming in this speech to address a

problem also I would say the level of threat connoted by by danger is also part of her beginning that persuasion with the pathos right because if she called it like the inconvenience of a single story that doesn't sound like that big of a deal the danger of a single story suddenly sounds way way worse so I think the level of threat implied by the word danger is an important part of that really foregrounding the emotional aspect of what she's going to talk about which which is how this harms others how this harms different people in the world now the way that she opens her speech is really important that short sentence I'm a Storyteller she's using ethos to show that she is from this world she is a

writer but also I think the way that it's phrased with the very definitive tone I I am a Storyteller and the use of that noun Storyteller it's almost as if that is how she defines herself she is defining herself by her capacity to tell stories which in turn you know shows us the power of literature but as she keeps going in this section it's very much about her um you know we see that very obviously with the fact that she's talking about her life they use the first person pronoun her choice in how she opens her speech again if we think about it from a structural point of view where do you begin how do you begin and she begins with her she begins with building a sense of yes ethos but I think also posos because she builds a

connection with her audience it's like here's who I am let me open myself up to you let me tell you about my life let me talk to you with that directive address if I would like to tell you let me speak to you directly let me be a bit funny as well if you think about how she's influencing the audience it's a nice sort of relaxing easing in the to what is going to be actually a really tough topic to address by making them feel a connection making the audience feel a connection with her by understanding who she is and her background and her coming across as just a really lovely friendly person who understands this world the other thing that's really important about this opening section where she

talks about herself a lot is the fact that she's using a lot of anecdotes and she's going to keep doing that for a lot of the speech using anecdotes and she tells this story about her stories that she used to write when she was little she tells the story of when she started reading and so on and she does that for two reasons one it again is part of ethos in terms of showing how powerful literature has been throughout her life you know the fact that she started reading at the age of well depending on whether you ask her or her mother two or four shows you know she really since she really really young age literature has been a powerful part of her life it also shows that she has been personally affected by the issue she's

going to talk about so that comes in more in the fact that the anecdote is about her having read British and American children's books and what she does is she ju the poses the difference in her life compared to the Western cultures that she is reading about out so she has this list all my characters were white and blueeyed they played in the snow they ate apples and they talked a lot about the weather how lovely it was that the sun had come out there we have a semantic field of Western culture white blueeyed snow apples talking about the weather the fact that that semantic field of westernness is appearing in her writing as a child shows the personal effect that it's had on her she is literally reproducing the world that she

is reading so what the Jer position then does is show how odd that is because the Jer position really contrasts how different her own actual life is from what she's reading so you know she has the fact of I lived in Nigeria I'd never been outside Nigeria we didn't have snow we ate mangoes and we never talked about the weather because there was no need to so she's deliberately sort of used the exact opposite of the western culture snow no snow apples mangoes talk about weather don't talk about weather is just supposed Nigerian cultures being the opposite to Western culture so that then shows us how the sort of limited diversity has affected her because what it's led to is her producing stories

that are not reflective of who she is and her life but reflective of a world she does not know and I think that is the key reason that she provides those facts I lived in Nigeria I had never been outside Nigeria those facts are important in framing this situation and how powerful literature is because if she's never been outside Nigeria the only way she's getting that kind of influence of the snow and the apples and the weather is from books that's that's how it's getting to her so it shows the power of literature and how much it is then influencing her so we go then into this next chunk she segs beautifully into the sort of wider issue at hand so she's been talking about her personally she's now going to move into sort of the

bigger problem she uses that anecdote structure speaking she puts the anecdote first because it's a nice way of yes connecting with the audience but it also illustrates The Logical Point she then wishes to make so she can sort of use the posos to demonstrate the logos and the reason she would do it that way round of the anecdote first and then the logic is because I think when you're trying to make the case for something quite complicated and serious you almost want to prove your point before you make your point if makes sense so structurally she proves it without telling the audience necessarily that's what she's doing and then she's like and therefore here's my point again it really effectively maintains the

connection with the audience This Time by not just suggesting that she's been affected by this issue but that the audience would be affected as well so we see that in this opening line of how impressionable and vulnerable we are in the face of a story so the impressionable and vulnerable is is what I'm saying is the emotive language because you know it makes especially when combined with that plural pronoun of we making it feel like it's you know it's us it's the direct address it's us who are impressionable and vulnerable it conveys a weakness that I think is quite emotive by using that plural pronoun of we it includes the audience she's very much talking about this is a problem that is affecting everybody and then

again she's uses more of an anecdote but she reframes it she talks about this issue of her not having external influences in a more logical way you know she essentially makes explicit the subtext behind the anecdote so she explicitly says I had become convinced that books by their very nature had to have foreigners in them and had to be about things which I with which I could not personally identify so she's making that crystal clear as part of her logical argument now not just in case the audience didn't pick it up but more as a reinforcement you know you want to be clear on what your actual argument is so she illustrates the argument and then makes it really clear what it is she's trying to argue she then has these uh

literary references now you'll have to forgive my absolute butchering of pronunciation um but chinoa aebe and Kamara Le are the uh writer's references that we have in this next paragraph and these literary references are on purpose they are specifically African writers what is implied behind those literary references is are they are people more like her coming from a similar culture as her uh representing her thinking about representation in literature she says that because of writers like them she went through a mental shift in her perception of literature so in other words because of there being writers who were from her world she was able to have this mental shift and I think that is again showing the power of literature

and in particular the power of representation within literature these two writers represent good representation that wording of mental shift is a literal change they have caused in her just showing the power of literature she then has this list where she says I realized that people like me girls with skin the color of chocolate whose kinky hair could not form ponytails could also exist in literature now of course that is really contrasting imagery to the appearance references we had earlier of blue eyes and uh white skin so she has skin the color of chocolate opposite the kinky hair cannot form ponytails ponytails represent something you can do with you know straight hair so again she's contrasting her appearance with as

a black woman with the appearance of a white person the reason I say it's paos it really shows the severity of how limited the diversity is but also shows why it's so important and why representation is so important because you know she wants to be able to see someone who looks like her in literature and she then uses these brilliant metaphors that go through why um literature is so powerful for her and I would say that across these metaphors she is appealing to Logos posos and Ethos so first of all she says that they stirred my imagination that grammatical structure of the active voice they stirred is really important in the metaphor of giving being literature a power and control now of course if we

think of imagination as conting someone's sort of creativity their openness to new possibilities that metaphor of it being stirred suggests it's being changed it's being added to in some way it's being mixed up and so what we're seeing in the power of literature is essentially the positive impact it has she then has this line they opened up new worlds for me which is another metaphor that continues this same idea that active voice again the literature is the one having the true impact and control and that's why it's so powerful and in the case of opening up new Worlds the worlds is a metaphor for the different cultures the different experiences out there all that good stuff so worlds being plural of course

indicates that there's loads of great things about the world loads of different cultures loads of different people Etc the fact that she's using world as as opposed to culture she's really trying to create a sense of scale as in you know world has a massiveness to it a complexity to it um that she's trying to say that literature has and of course as well it could also be a reference to the fact that you know when you're dealing with fantasy dystopia so on and so forth writers can literally Ed worlds as well they can invent worlds that are not real so it's a reference to that too so those being that verb opened it's making it accessible to her so very similar meaning to the stirred my imagination the way it can shift the way

that you see the world she then however adds a little like butt into it like here's the great things but she says but the unintended consequence was that I did not know that people like me could exist in literature she is managing really successfully in terms of trying to argue a case persuade an audience part of how she's managing to do it so successfully is having the Nuance of you know the both sides the the positive ways in which literature is powerful and the negative ways in which literature is powerful I think also the final line of this so what the discovery of African writers did for me was this it saved me from having a single story of what books are the key word in terms of the pthos

is the saved me because if we remember the title of the danger of a single story and the level of threat that implies then being saved also is a very emotive powerful choice of word when considering impact the representation has had on her so she's almost taking her title and flipping it going from you know here's the issue of the dangers of a single story having representation in literature saved me from having a single story so she almost flips her title to show again this time the positive way in which literature is powerful when there is representation so we come now to a another anecdote she very much in the beginning of the speech is just anecdote after anecdote after anecdote and I think structurally that's important

because she's essentially going through her life and different events throughout her life that all show repeatedly the same issue and she gets older through each anecdote as well and I think that's important in the ethos and showing how this issue that she's talking about she hasn't just been affected by it once she's been affected by it repeatedly throughout her life so having that structure of having multiple anecdotes that follow through her life just really helps yes with the ethos but also again with the logos of like look at me setting up my case more proof more proof more proof of this issue happening in a bunch of different ways as well this is the anecdote with feay and feeling pity

for Fay's family and what's interesting about this anecdote the way that she flips things this time is the fact that she is the one who was guilty of the behavior uh she says at the end of this anecdote their poverty was my single story of them again this is part of showing the problem with this limited diversity because we literally have an anecdote of her being Prejudice of her stereotyping F's family and this time of course it's not a racial Dynamic it's a class Dynamic so she's also looking at a different way in which there can be this limitation of diversity in this problem and and the way in which she writes this anecdote has a lot in common with the others in terms of also being quite

emotive so that imagery of the beautifully patterned basket is really powerful in adding a Humanity to Fay's family that then jxap poses she had enormous pity for them she wants us to see how narrow-minded her viewpoint was and I also think there's some more emotive language in when she says it had become impossible for me to see them as anything else but poor the extremity connoted by impossible is about really showing that power of these narratives and how much they can blind us to the reality of the world and how much they can make us really just focus on our stereotype and our prejudice above all else so we now come on to our next anecdote which is the one of her being in the United States age 19 so it's like

I've already said before we have this temporal shift in years later temporal just means time and by showing us that it's happening again and again and again throughout her life we see what a pervasive issue this is and exactly the same as the other anecdotes it is all about the ethos and the logos to really illustrate her argument and show you know she has personally experienced this she has been through this multiple times I'm going to talk about a one-sentence paragraph which of course you wouldn't know it was a one- sentence paragraph when you are listening to it but if you listen to her say the speech she pauses after saying this sentence it's the same concept the same impact she's trying to

have either way she picks one aspect of the single story that her roommate has about her that is particularly ignorant and ridiculous African people do not have basic kitchen wear and that's why I think she's made that one particular one stand out what's interesting about the way she then reflects on this anecdote she has this line about she had felt sorry for me even before she saw me her default position toward me as an African was a kind of patronizing well-meaning pity which of course has Echoes of her feed anecdote she felt pity for feed and his family by structuring the anecdotes in this way by having the an fed anecdote before this one what we see is how this problem of stereotyping and

having the single story in the pity multiple people are capable of doing that to multiple other people anybody is capable of having this Prejudice and stereotyping as a consequence of the sto the single story that they are aware of and she repeats this metaphor of the single story again she says and my roommate had a single story of Africa a single story of catastrophe in this single story there was no possibility of Africans being similar to her in any way no possibility of feelings more complex than pity no possibility of a connection as human equals that repe heed use of the single story of Africa a single story of catastrophe the use of that parallelism she's creating a direct equivalence Africa and catastrophe

they're the same thing in the eyes of her roommate by creating that parallelism we see the extremity of the stereotyping and Prejudice and she then breaks down the third time she references the single story she now breaks down you know what exactly is the problem with this single story no similarities no feelings more complex than pity Etc that listing and that repetition of no no no is again really emotionally powerful because the repeated no creates such a sense of things being really limited and then what she's listing as there being not any of is Nuance abstract feelings of empathy and understanding and so what she is saying that there is none of that there is an incredibly limited amount of

is understanding of one another as human beings an inability to recognize the humanity in one another is is what she's saying the problem is and emotionally posos speaking is is quite sad so in this next section she really starts tie the different anecdotes together and we see how they Interlink and irrelevant to each other so she's been through that process of understanding the danger of a single story the impact on her and how she can do it to others and the posos I think just comes in from that emotional empathy pretty sure her Western audience are an American by and large audience and so when she's talking about this us roommate she empathizes with them and I think that's why when we go on to this

next anecdote as well about Mexico and the US again I think she's choosing an example if her Ted dog is in America which I'm pretty sure it is she's choosing an example that feels really relevant and pertinent to the US audience that they will perhaps be able to be while listening to her anecdote about herself still able to think about themselves and their situation because they'll have seen Mexican people and how they're presented in the news as well and they might be starting to think hm how am I reflected in the single story what's interesting about when she goes through the perception of Africa in the media she has this list of if all I knew about Africa were from popular images I too would think that Africa was a place

of beautiful landscapes beautiful animals and incomprehensible people fighting senseless Wars dying of poverty and AIDS unable to speak for themselves and waiting to be saved by a kind white Foreigner now what's interesting in this list is the contrast and the stereotypes so the Lord presentation of the nature and geography beautiful landscapes beautiful animals versus the pejorative presentation of the human beings we see how extreme the stereotypes are it's all very extreme imagery what's important also about this Mexico anecdote is it widens the message remember I said at the beginning that I put in my PowerPoint literature is powerful but really it's about more than just literature and here she really does

clearly extend her message to The Wider media because she makes it about the news she talks about the endless stories of Mexicans as people who were fleecing their Health Care System sneaking across the border being arrested the border that sort of thing so it's not just literature is powerful it's just the narratives fiction and non-fiction that we tell about people are powerful storytelling is powerful what similar though about the way that she tells this anecdote with the others is that she again creates the contrast between stereotype in reality so just as with the very first anecdote it was like snow versus no snow apples versus mangoes here it's fleecing the Health Care System arrested the Border versus

smoking laughing rolling up tortillas now I think what's really important about the contrast in the imagery there the IM the first lot of imagery all connotes criminality fleecing the system sneaking the Border being arrested there is a pattern of criminality there conversely the going to work rolling up to tears smoking laughing it's just a semantic field of ordinary life it comes back to what she's saying about the empathy comes from just recognizing the humanity in others so as that us roommate couldn't see them as equals couldn't see the similarity the problem with the limited diversity and the stereotypes and the Prejudice is the way it makes you stop seeing them as your equal as everyday just ordinary humans

living life we then end this anecdote with that repeated metaphor again I had bought into the single story of Mexicans and I could not have been more ashamed of myself what we do want to analyze from here from a structural perspective is her constantly coming back to that single story because that metaphor so beautifully encapsulates the point she's trying to make about the issue of the lack of representation and limited diversity she keeps using that metaphor to represent her key argument her key idea going forward via that one concept of the single story she then applies it to multiple different people and groups and we see how again it's pervasive it just is a constant thing that's happening in our society is a single

story a limited perception of a particular person culture group Etc being applied the first thing I want to talk about is again that repetition so we have repetition first of all so that is how to create a single story show a people as one thing as only one thing over and over again and that is what they become just as I've just been saying about why she keeps repeating the single story that's what we've got going on here this next paragraph I think is one of the most important in the entire speech because she essentially makes her core argument here she distills down the arguments she's been making throughout the speech and puts them in this beautiful little paragraph stories have been used I think that grammar is really

important so she's using the passive voice there the key about the passive voice here is we don't know who has been using stories and I think that's an important aspect to you know the point isn't so much the who because she's not trying to place blame on a particular person or a particular group she's just trying to point out the problem with that behavior the consequences of that behavior so she uses the passive voice in stories have been used to dispossess and to malign now obviously dispossess and to malign both have very uh pejorative connotations of causing harm to a group of people and she then flips that with the parallelism of stories can also be used to empower and to humanize she does negative consequence in one

positive consequence in the other it creates a sort of equality between the two sides that are being paralleled if we think about almost this sentence being on some weighing scales by using the exact same grammar the weighing scales are balanced and so what it does is create a sense that the potential consequences the negative outcome and the positive outcome are equally possible and her doing that she does it a second time then in the next sentence stories can break the Dignity of a people but stories can also repair that broken dignity so she takes this metaphor of breaking the dignity and then she flips it and uses its opposite of repairing it as well that's a really important point in her the Nuance logic

to her argument is the stories are neither good nor bad it's how we as human beings use them that is good or bad what I also really like about the metaphor of stories can break the Dignity of a people but stories can also repair that broken dignity is the idea of like we can make things better that is what the repair side of it means we can heal things we can improve things even if there has been this negative consequence it doesn't have to stay that way and that's what the repair metaphor symbolizes she then has this bit where she talks about the American writer Alice Walker there's a couple reasons why I think she does this the first is that this is a significant cultural reference for her pretty sure North

American but certainly at least Western audience Alice walk is a really famous novelist in the Western World what this is doing is adding in the ethos of another fellow writer what's interesting about the story that she tells here is that it's again about the power of literature arguably because a southern person is reading a book about the south they see themselves being represented in this literature and it feels so incredible to them it's being compared to a paradise now that really shows the power of liter in terms of and again the importance of diversity and representation the fact that it's Alice Walker's anecdote about her family it really shows us you know literature has always had this power and that adich is

talking about it's not just her who's gone through it other writers have experienced it as well and have talked other people have experienced this and have talked about it she then says she would like to end on this thought that when we reject the single story when we realize that there is never a single story about any place we regain a kind of paradise so she really beautifully reuses Alice Walker's words for her own argument about the single story this final line is really effective in meeting the logos ethos and the posos this is what we would call a coder c o d a coder the ending The Logical concluding remark to her whole speech that plural pronoun of the we right to the very end she's keeping that audience

connection when we re the single story and I think that's part of the very subtle Call to Arms of this speech because it's making them feel that sense of responsibility when we reject when we realize and she also therefore is able to present the positive outcome from learning from their behavior as something they will collectively get to experience we regain a kind of paradise so it sounds lovely for everybody which is wonderful