I have a similar experience with Chimamanda’s being treated with stereotypes. I am from Shandong province where every man should be stereotypically tall and strong with masculinity, but the fact is that I don’t. I was often joked at because of my height, but I would rather accept these jokes as the first topic for me to chat with others from China that have stereotype on Shandong people. But what Chimamanda is talking about hints a much larger context of racism and regional discrimination. The literature creates an image of Africa to attract white men in the western world with an exotic perspective, and people would take it for granted that what the literature says about Africa is the true Africa, without considering the logic behind the capitalized cultural product.
More importantly, Chimamanda’s experience has many things to say to us who are the fresh hands in media production. The media provides the audience with a powerful tool to perceive information, thus what content to produce is an important thing to consider. As media producers, on the one hand, we need to record the objects that we want to produce with less bias and try to think in the objects’ shoes in order to take a proper angle to tell stories. On the other hand, media producers should also consider the powerfulness of the medium, and have less bias in the production process in what to say and what to cut. As the audience of media production, it is also a question for us to think about whether the story in the things we see is biased or not.