Writing an(Other) Europe
Challenging peripheries in Chika Unigwe’s fiction on Belgium
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 7889447 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Patricia Bastida Rodríguez (0000-0001-7626-7076, corresponding author), Patricia Bastida-Rodríguez, Elisabeth Bekers (0000-0001-7866-1421) |
| Year | 2021 |
| Volume | 57 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 386-400 |
| Publication date | 2021-05-04 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of Postcolonial Writing (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1744-9855 • E-ISSN: 1744-9863 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/17449855.2021.1920746 |
| OpenAlex | W3165512046 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 21 |
Nigerian-born author Chika Unigwe situates a substantial part of her oeuvre in contemporary, multicultural Belgium, a location rarely explored in postcolonial literatures despite its colonial history and sizable migrant communities. This article demonstrates how, in her short fiction and her novels The Phoenix (2007) and On Black Sisters’ Street (2009), Unigwe’s literary portraits of the country, based on the perceptions and experiences of Nigerian migrants living there, challenge traditional centre/periphery dichotomies. Her characters, who are mainly young Nigerian women, move across boundaries between Africa and Europe, the big city and the provincial town, the city centre and the suburbs, the touristic historic centre and the red-light district, their mobilities characteristic of contemporary globalized societies. The fictions are analysed to highlight the equivocality of centres and peripheries and the permeability of the borders that separate them, as well as the resilient mobility of Nigerian migrants in Belgium
Archaeology · Art history · Colonialism · Dichotomy · Ethnology · Geography · Multiculturalism · Portrait · Sociology · Linguistic and Sociocultural Studies · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies · Travel Writing and Literature · Gender Studies · History
Powers of Horror
Imagining London
The Stranger Flâneuse and the Aesthetics of Pedestrianism
Postcolonial Belgium
Congolese Migration to Belgium and Postcolonial Perspectives
From “sepulchral city” to “open city”
An Interview with Chika Unigwe
Borrowed Smile
On the train from Leuven
Postcolonial London
Writing Africa in Belgium, Europe
The invisible flâneuse
The practice of everyday life
Legacies of an imperial past in a small nation. Patterns of postcolonialism in Belgium
Europe as Borderland
The Invisible Flâneuse. Women and the Literature of Modernity
On writing transnational migration in On Black Sisters' Street (2009) and Better Never Than Late (2019)
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,25 |
| Citation span | 2022 - 2022 (1) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |