Shifting perspectives in gender representation: a corporeal study of women’s roles in contemporary Nigerian fiction

This thesis analyses the work of three contemporary Nigerian writers, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), Chika Unigwe’s On Black Sisters’ Street and Sefi Atta’s Everything Good Will Come (2005). Adichie, Unigwe and Atta are all women of Nigerian origin, have lived in Nigeria at some point in their lives and have presently relocated to the West, or are presently living in Nigeria while still maintaining that link with the West as second ‘home’ qualifying them as Nigerians in Diaspora. Their works of fiction cover a range of diverse themes and genres from historical fiction and bildungsroman to politics, sexuality and mapping of women’s agency in urban spaces. This study focuses on the recent women’s writing that has come out of Nigeria and is important because of the problematic representation of women in first generation writing in terms of agency and voice. My study addresses these main questions. What role have women played in Nation formation and what is nationalism to them in terms of the post – colonial state and experience? How have women writers positioned themselves in terms of the representation of women in contemporary Literature and what is the relationship between women’s bodies, patriarchal structures and the post - colonial nation? How are the agencies of women being mapped across these novels and in what ways has this changed over the last ten years or so as represented in literary analysis?There is a vast amount of writing coming out of Nigeria at the moment and I think it is important to chisel down my choices by categorizing these authors in this way.This project is largely a body project, and I will be considering the gendered human body as the prototype of society marking the site of representation where disorder in the society is enacted upon and considering the politics of this. I will be using novels by the afore mentioned authors as my primary text in order to analyze the ways in which their modes of literary expression reflect the changing perception of African women against the wider theoretical scholarship on women’s bodies and feminism