The Thing Around Your Neck is a short-story collection by Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, first published in April 2009 by Fourth Estate in the UK and by Knopf in the US.

[6] Adichie's contemporary Elleke Boehmer commends "The Headstrong Historian" for its feminist agenda, which is identified as extending Achebe's Things Fall Apart and challenging its account of Igbo history.

[7] Contemporary feminist scholar Anene Ejikeme notes that, since its publication in Western publishing outlets, Things Fall Apart has been celebrated as the authentic account of the late nineteenth-century Igbo experience during the colonial era.

[16] Kamene Okonjo presents a feminist reading of 'The Headstrong Historian,' which says that Adichie establishes the historicity of her narrative by invoking Achebe's colonial context and representing the Igbo dual-sex system.

[20] One criticism of Achebe's Things Fall Apart focuses on the representation of women as powerless in the Igbo tribal system, beyond conducting marriage ceremonies.

[24] Tunca says that Adichie further remaps the ideal of masculinity in Things Fall Apart by presenting Obierika as a flute player, which is described in Achebe's text as an "unmanly" characteristic.

Conversely, Tunca also maintains that although Nwamgba "wrestled her brother to the ground", her father warns "everyone not to let the news leave the compound", in compliance with normative gender hierarchies.

At Nwangba's bedside, Grace puts "down her schoolbag, inside of which was her textbook with a chapter called "The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of Southern Nigeria", by an administrator from Worcestershire who had lived among them".

[20] Susan VanZanten identifies this as a direct intertextual allusion to Achebe's Things Fall Apart, which sees the local District Commissioner contemplate narrating Okonkwo's life in a chapter of his book on The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.

[29] Tunca's analysis says that Grace acknowledges what Adichie herself refers to in her 2009 TED talk, "the danger of a single story" in representing the history of an entire people.