Navigating diaspora: An experience of female characters of African descent in selected novels by African female writers
Main Article Content
Abstract
The emigration of female characters of African descent in Adichie’s Americanah, Mbue’s Behold the Dreamers, Unigwe’s On Black Sisters’ Street and Darko’s Beyond the Horizon from Africa to Europe and the United States of America is initially filled with hope for their perceived utopian world. Leaving what was their home for the better part of their lives, places they would easily identify with, to alien borders in which they would have to restart their lives excited them. This feeling results from a state of ‘double consciousness’, described by postcolonial theorists as a perception of the world divided between two antagonistic cultures. The female characters’ perception of the first world as ideal counters their perception of Nigeria, Ghana and Cameroon as homes which have not provided a sense of fulfilment to their lives, thus prompting emigration from their respective indigenous homes to the first world. This paper entails an analytical discussion of the relationships among female characters of African descent and other characters as a way of negotiating their stay in diaspora. This paper is guided by concepts of Sisterhood as argued by Rosezellle and bell hooks; and concepts of postcolonial theory including unhomeliness and othering as articulated by Bhabha and Spivak.
Downloads
Article Details
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
This open-access article is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) 4.0 license.
You are free to: Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format. Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially. The licensor cannot revoke these freedoms as long as you follow the license terms.
Under the following terms: Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.
No additional restrictions You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.
How to Cite
References
Adichie, C. N. (2013). Americanah. New York: Alfred A. Knopf
Bhabha, H. (1994). The Location of Culture. London: Routledge.
Brah, A. (1996). Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities. New York: Routledge.
Darko, A. (1995). Beyond the Horizon. Edinburgh Gate: Heinemann.
Gilroy, P. (1993). The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London: Verso.
Lefebvre, H. (1991). Donald Nicholson-Smith, and David Harvey. The Production of Space.
Mbue, I. (2017). Behold the Dreamers. London: 4th Estate.
Oniwe, B. A. (2017). Narrating the (Im)Migrant Experience: 21st Century African Fiction in the Age of Globalization. (Doctoral dissertation).
Spivak, G. C. (2017). "Can the Subaltern Speak?" Marxism and Interpretation of Culture. Eds. Carry Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. London: Macmillan, 66-104.
Tyson, L. (2006). Critical Theory Today. London & New York: Routledge.
Unigwe, C. (2009). On Black Sisters’ Street. London: Vintage Books.
Woolf, V. (1929). A Room of One's Own. New York: Harcourt Brace and Company.