Doing Motherhood, Doing Home
Mothering as Home-Making Practice in Half of a Yellow Sun
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 20249351 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Barbara Jilek (Böcklinstraße 70/10, 1020 Vienna, Austria, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2020 |
| Volume | 9 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 107 |
| Publication date | 2020-09-08 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Humanities (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2076-0787 • E-ISSN: 2076-0787 |
| Publisher | MDPI AG (PUBLISHER • IT) |
| DOI | 10.3390/h9030107 |
| OpenAlex | W3084094189 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 19 |
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
Mad Mothers, Bad Mothers, and What a "Good" Mother Would Do
Home
Gender (Re)configuration in Nigerian Literature through Time and Space
Diasporic Constructions of Home and Belonging
The Intersections of Whiteness
Confronting Postmaternal Thinking
“Under Western Eyes” Revisited
From Victims to Agents
Locating Home in the Postcolonial Moment
Making a ‘Home Away from Home’
Gender and language in sub-Saharan African contexts
Home Is Where Mother Is
(Re)Constructing Masculinity and Femininity in African War Narratives
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1 |
| Citation span | 2026 - 2026 (1) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |