Noted authors Chimamanda Adichie, and Zadie Smith recently sat down at the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture to discuss race, identity, feminism, and defining your identity in the global community.

The two authors discuss why Adichie’s critically-acclaimed work Americanah is such a distinctive voice in contemporary literature. They also touched on the issue of black identity in the context of culture and nationality especially in relationship to African-American history and culture. At one point, Smith states that there isn’t a well-defined “Black British Culture,” an assertion that has been made by many British writers and thinkers of African descent in the past. Adichie addresses having multiple identities at once as a black person, and a black immigrant, in America.