PHD-School of Humanities & Social Sciences

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This collections contains bibliographic information and abstracts of PHD theses and dissertation in the School of Humanities & Social Sciences held in Kenyatta University Library

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Browsing PHD-School of Humanities & Social Sciences by Subject "African Descent"

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    Emigration in Selected Transnational Fiction by African Women Writers: A Study of Female Characters of African Descent
    (Kenyatta University, 2022) Makokha, Gloria Ajami; Mugo Muhia; Oluoch Obura
    This study engaged with selected works of four West African women authors whose works centre on the idea of home as interrogated through the lenses of narratives of migration. These works, including Amma Darko’s Beyond the Horizon (1995), Chika Unigwe’s On Black Sisters’ Street (2009), Chimamanda Adichie’s Americanah (2013), and Imbolo Mbue’s Behold the Dreamers (2016) explore how the experience of migration is gendered as much as it is complicated by issues of class, race and citizenship. The task examined how the texts narrate the notion of home through the movement of characters across borders either by will or by force. Emigration, as one of the key cultural dynamics of the 21st Century, has been foregrounded to illustrate its disruptive potential in the lives of migrant women as well as that of those they closely relate with. While there are many other feminist analyses of works by earlier black female writers of the past century, this study extended the critical horizon of these narratives by proposing that transnational mobility of African female characters can be more productive if the distabilising experience of migration is read as embodied in the texts. This study illustrates subjectivity as problematised by the dynamics of home and diaspora, through the engagement with the protagonists in the chosen works by authors from the West African nations (Ghana, Nigeria, and Cameroon). This exercise fused together the Postcolonial theoretical standpoints as articulated by Homi Bhabha, Edward Said and Gayatri Spivak, and Avtar Brah’s ideas of “home” and “diasporic inscriptions”. This study employed textual analysis as the methodology for collecting, organizing, interpreting and analysing data on the gendered nature of migration as presented in the four texts under study. While quite a number of studies have been carried out on each text, conferencing all of them under one methodological interrogation widened their semantic potential by drawing attention to a new “way of reading” and point to alternative critical possibilities of engaging migrant narratives. This study concluded that emigration is indeed a 21st Century phenomenon that cannot be ignored. Despite posing a challenge to African nations, emigration is a mode of exposure to Africans, a few of who return home to build their nations, while a good number stay on in the diaspora willingly or unwillingly, thus economically benefitting the diasporic states. This was attributed to ‘modes of self fashioning’ for colonial subjects like mimicry and self-hate. The protagonists in the selected texts, who were the main focus of this study, basically have a ‘love-hate’ relationship with the West. While they initially perceive the West as redemptive, their experiences in the West disillusion them, thus their dilemma of whether to return to Africa or stay on in the West. The study opens further critical analysis of novels addressing emigration from: Western Africa to Asian states; the East African and Southern African states to the West and from the West and East to Africa. It also extends further analysis on the disenfranchisement of male characters of African descent in the West as written by both female and male authors.