“Second class citizen”: female subjects and identity fragmentation in a post-colonial world

Abstract

Contemporaneity bears the marks of its time such as geographical, symbolic and ontological shifts, but also the historical traces of colonial exploitation and the identity fragmentation that it potentiated. This literary analysis, based on the volume “Second Class Citizen” (2018) by the Nigerian writer Buchi Emecheta, aims to problematize the identity fragmentation and transmutation experienced by immigrants, as well as its contemporary effects. In this reflection, the role of Literature as a tool for the consolidation of a new enunciative locus of such groups and subjects is addressed, as well as its centrality for the reconstruction of historical and political narratives based on the dialectic process of identity construction. Based on the highly autobiographical experiences of the character Adah different types of displacement and alterity can be observed: the place of women in Igbo patriarchal society, the framing of African immigrants, and their descendants, in the English social structure, and the importance of immigrant women to the establishment of new literary perspectives and female subjects. The volume, published in the 70’s, raises questions that reflect in today’s society and contributes to the understanding of the historical processes of deterritorialization and identity re-signification here addressed.