Becoming black in Belgium: The social construction of blackness in Chika Unigwe's authorial self-representation and On Black Sisters' Street. (March 2014)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: De Mul, Sarah
• Is Part Of: Journal of Commonwealth literature. Volume 49:Number 1(2014:Mar.)
• Page Start: 11
• Page End: 27
• Publication Date: 2014-03
• Subjects: African diasporic writing -- Europe -- Flanders -- multiculturalism -- strategic exoticism; English literature -- Periodicals; Commonwealth literature (English) -- Periodicals; Littérature anglaise -- Périodiques; 820.05
• DOI: 10.1177/0021989413516120
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0021-9894

Abstract

In the satirical column entitled "Zwart worden in zeven lessen" ( Becoming Black in Seven Lessons ), the Nigerian-Belgian writer Chika Unigwe considers black identity as a social construction and coming to Europe as an entry to a social imaginary, a discursive space where subjects are already imagined, constructed and treated as "black" by hegemonic discourses. Using Becoming Black in Seven Lessons as a starting point, in this essay I explore the social construction of black identity in relation to, on the one hand, Unigwe's authorial self-representation as an ethnic minority writer in Flanders (the Dutch language region of Belgium) and, on the other hand, the identity negotiations of the African immigrant women in the Flemish city of Antwerp in Unigwe's second novel On Black Sisters' Street . Central to this inquiry will be the question of how the author Unigwe on the one hand and the African sex workers in On Black Sisters' Street become black in Belgium and how they negotiate a sense of self vis-à-vis the already pronounced social order. I argue more specifically that their self-representations reveal the mediation of dominant historical images and Western symbolic meanings and their attempts to wrest control of the construction of their bodies away from the distorted visions of dominant culture. Without conflating Unigwe's situation as a black middle-class author in the Flemish literary field with the position of the four Nigerian women working in the sex industry described in the book, parallels can be drawn between them, as I wish to contend, in the ways in which their agency is established in the performance of cultural configurations of black identity which have seized hegemonic hold.