"Voicing Creative Uprisings": Women and the Nigerian Diaspora in Buchi Emecheta's Second-Class Citizen and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Americanah

This articleanalysestwo novels published by two writers of Nigerian-Igbo descent: Buchi Emecheta’s Second-Class Citizen(1974) and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah(2013),examiningthe connections between the authors’ and their female characters’ movements and mobilities. This essayfirstcompares the two fictions and the different migration experiences of the two novels’ main protagonists, Adah and Ifemelu, in the United Kingdom and the United States, respectively. Second, itshowshow these textscan be read as what Carole Boyce Davies describes as “uprising textualities”(1997), that is,narratives of women’sresistance, reassertion, renewal and rethinkingthat simultaneously celebrate women’screativity.Writing, indeed,playsa pivotalrole for both the novelists and their characters. Itisnot only a tool to explore their personalexperiences inthe Global South and the complex relationshipsbetween their travels and the spaces of marginality in which they live, but it is also a political instrument to denounce social inequalities, challengehegemonic representations,andEurocentric and masculine epistemologies. This paperaims todemonstrate howthe “South” also exists in the geographic Northand how the novelists and their respective fictional characters,through writing, voice their “creative uprisings”and simultaneously negotiatetheir complex and multifaceted identities and subjectivities in different times and spaces.