Suchergebnisse

Monumental dispersals caused by the phenomenon of migration greatly affect the identities of people. Much like the process of globalization, migration is highly sexualized and gendered. To this extent, it is necessary to centralize women and their peculiar experiences in migration discourses and theories. Beyond the usual focus on the economics, politics and sociology of migration, which at any rate do not often adequately address gender-specific migratory experiences; this study takes a literary route that considers the fictional representations of migrant women in two of the novels of Chika Unigwe: The Phoenix (2005) and On Black Sisters' Street (2008). The focus here is to underscore the validity and significance of gender as an imperative analytical premise in contemporary literary debates particularly by African migrants. In demonstrating how the inflections of gender portend different outcomes for men and women, the study significantly uncovers how the woman's body is simultaneously the site of physical and symbolic migration. The essay traces the movement in transition and the impact of these and new environment on the bodies of female migrants and how the embodied motifs of migration ultimately alter the identities and realities of migrant African women in particular. In all, the essay hopes to expand some of the current theorizations on the new directions in the development of the fictional representations of Nigerian women as well as to contextualize the role of the émigré author in these developments.

In modern socializations, the public sphere is often a political space that gives entrée to the citizenry for unrestricted participation in public discourse. Expectedly, it opens up discursive spaces in which people either as individuals or as collectives can engage in critical debates for the transformation and growth of the common weal. This, more or less corroborates Jürgen Habermas' (1989) treatise in which no individual or group may be marginalized or excluded from the democratic process. This paper examines Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo's contestation of the expropriation of public spaces by both the imperialist ideology of the colonialists and the patriarchal orthodoxy of Umuga, the nineteenth century setting of her first novel, The Last of the Strong Ones (1996). In this novel, the author demonstrates that the contours and constructions of the female body in particular, inevitably intersect with discourses of the political sphere which sets in motion the dialectic debates of the public/private spheres. She thus, rigorously contends for what this paper describes as an inclusivist public space in which the interlocutors treat each other as equals in a cooperative on matters of common concern. To this end, Adimora-Ezeigbo's women, once included in public spheres, shape, impact, and redefine them by producing alternative discourses, symbols, and images about womanhood, citizenship, and political participation in Umuga for the transformation of that society.