Doing Motherhood, Doing Home

Mothering as Home-Making Practice in Half of a Yellow Sun

Dados Bibliográficos

ID20249351
AutoresBarbara Jilek (Böcklinstraße 70/10, 1020 Vienna, Austria, autor correspondente)
Ano2020
Volume9
Fascículo3
Páginas107
Data de publicação2020-09-08
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoHumanities (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 2076-0787 • E-ISSN: 2076-0787
EditoraMDPI AG (PUBLISHER • IT)
DOI10.3390/h9030107
OpenAlexW3084094189
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas1
Referências citadas19

Home and motherhood are tightly interwoven, particularly in the dominant conceptualizations of home as a physical and emotional refuge from the public world. However, a closer look into these concepts helps question the naturalization of both motherhood and home, revealing them as shaped by complex lived experiences and relations instead. I argue that such a rethinking of home and motherhood beyond essentialist discourse is prominent in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s postcolonial novel Half of a Yellow Sun. Drawing on concepts and theories from the fields of gender studies and geography, and taking into account the postcolonial, Nigerian context of the novel, I address how Adichie’s 2006 piece of historical fiction thematizes the intersection point of motherhood and home as a relational practice. Adichie provides alternative conceptualizations of motherhood and home through her focus on performative, ritualized mothering practices that also function as relational home-making practices and that stretch beyond gender and biological relations. Through the central ambivalence that emerges in the novel when the female protagonist chooses and practices a traditional mother role but simultaneously does not correspond to the dominant Nigerian ideal of a mother, Adichie destabilizes binary views of both home and of motherhood

Aesthetics · Ambivalence · Art · Epistemology · Essentialism · Naturalization · Performative utterance · Population · Sociology · African Sexualities and LGBTQ+ Issues · Gender Studies · History · Philosophy · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies · Psychology · Social Psychology

Ferramentas

Abrir DOIOpen Access