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Transnational Forced Prostitution, African Female Bodies and Corporeal Resistance

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Transnational Forced Prostitution, African Female Bodies and Corporeal Resistance DISLOCATED SUBJECTS: TRANSNATIONAL FORCED PROSTITUTION, AFRICAN FEMALE BODIES AND CORPOREAL RESISTANCE A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Georgetown University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in English By Laura E. Chasen, B.A. Washington, DC April 23, 2010 Copyright 2010 by Laura E. Chasen All Rights Reserved ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction: Feminist Praxis, Corporeal Progress………………………………………1 Chapter 1: The Geography of Form - Bodies, Space and Capitalist Desire in Amma Darko’s Beyond the Horizon .....………………………………………………................9 Chapter 2: Reinscribing Power – Corporeal Acts and Body Inscription in Chris Abani’s, Becoming Abigail ……………………………………………………………………….26 Conclusion: What Can the Body Do for Transnational Feminism? – From the Individual to the Collective………………………………………………………………………...48 Bibliography………………………………………………………………………….....56 iii Introduction: Feminist Praxis, Corporeal Progress When I was working (in Nigeria), a friend told me that she had a friend, a woman, who arranged visas to Europe for girls who wanted to study … I went to my parents one day and we chatted about the matter. I am their first daughter and they wanted me to study … When I knew what was going on, you know, what could I do? I knew what they wanted me for in just a few hours after I arrived here and I was trapped. How could I escape, with no money, no car, no airplane ticket? … I didn’t even speak the language! Oh! It was impossible! … I still write my family, I have since I have been here. At first I told them that my life is fine here, I was working and studying. I did not like to lie to them. I wrote one day and I told them everything, I told them the truth … I have not received a letter, not even a common letter from them. -Charlotte, a prisoner in Rebbibia prison in Italy interviewed by anthropologist Asale Angel-Anjani, “Trafficking, African Women, and Transnational Practices” in Diasporic Africa The coercion, sexual abuse, cultural alienation and familial rejection that mark Charlotte’s real-life experiences as a forced prostitute manifest central concerns in my analysis of two contemporary African novels, Chris Abani’s, Becoming Abigail and Amma Darko’s, Beyond the Horizon , published in 2006 and 1995 respectively. In their novels, Darko and Abani imagine the lives of young women lured from Africa and forced into prostitution in Europe. My goal for this project is twofold. First, I explore how features of postcolonial culture and contemporary globalization produce the transnational business of forced prostitution in these novels; and second, I examine how forced prostitution across national and cultural borders shapes the Diasporic African female experience in Abani’s and Darko’s texts. How, I ask, do global shifts from postcolonial African to European physical and cultural space affect the formation of the Diasporic African female subject? How does forced sexual labor and physical violence shape this process? What forms of resistance are possible for Diasporic African women forced into prostitution? In their anthology, Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures , Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Talpade Mohanty explore these questions by probing how social forces “discipline” the female body. Specifically, they offer analysis on different ways in which female bodies are or can be disciplined and how these forms of discipline may complicate one another. I look at how female bodies are disciplined "within discourses of profit maximization, as global workers and sexual laborers" and within "discourses of originary nuclear family, as wives and mothers" and daughters in Abani’s and Darko’s novels (xxiii). Engaging Amina Mama’s argument in “Sheroes and Villains: Conceptualizing Colonial and Contemporary Violence Against Women in Africa,” that the inheritance of patriarchy from the colonial to the postcolonial state in many African countries perpetuates the colonization of African women, I look at how colonial legacies reinforce physical and psychological subjugation of females in both Abani’s and Darko’s novels. I draw on Alexander and Mohanty’s conception of often- conflicting processes of “disciplining and mobilizing” female bodies, “particularly Third World” bodies “in order to consolidate patriarchal and colonizing processes,” as a way of examining how and why women in the two novels are forced into prostitution by male family members (xxiii). I expand Mama’s argument beyond the realm of the African state by analyzing how the novels link two European countries, England and Germany, and two African countries, Nigeria and Ghana, in continuing colonial relationships through contemporary global economic configurations. Working from Anthony Giddens’ definition of 2 globalization as “the intensification of worldwide social relations which link distant localities,” I posit that such linking of “distant localities” through economic relationships propagates hetero-patriarchal structures across geographic and national borders in the novels (181). Exploring how forced prostitution emerges at the conjunction of colonial histories, globalization and hetero-patriarchy constitutes a central aim of my project. Anthropologist, Asale Angel-Anjani has studied the forced prostitution of Nigerian women in Italy and ties this form of slavery on a global level to “economic degradation … rapid urbanization and migration” (300). And in “Feminism, Postcolonialism and the Contradictory Orders of Modernity,” Ato Quayson asserts that contemporary conditions for women “are greatly aggravated in the Third World, where women’s existences are strung between traditionalism and modernity,” (585) demonstrating an example of “the tension between cultural homogenization and heterogenization” that Arjun Appadurai views as “the central problem of today’s global interactions” (30). My project puts these theorists in conversation as I analyze how intersections among globalization, colonialism and traditional cultural practices contribute to the proliferation of forced prostitution and violence in Abani and Darko’s texts. By doing so, I examine the relationships among these superstructural forces and the violence that the protagonists of the two novels endure. Abani and Darko employ particular narrative techniques to emphasize these relationships. I explore how Abani plays with shifting temporality, positing that this fractured mode highlights how historical relics of colonialism persist through the disciplining of the female body. By moving back and forth from the past to the present, Abani portrays how continuing patriarchal structures compromise the agency and safety 3 of African women across chronological time. Likewise, he shifts the spatial structure of the novel between London and a Nigerian village, drawing attention to the ways in which global capitalism propels the disciplining of women across national boundaries. Darko, on the other hand, offers a more linear structure, allowing readers to follow her protagonist’s path from a rural village, to the Ghanaian capitol and finally to the European metropolis. This structure presents conflicting cultural and economic expectations in these different locations and allows readers to trace the path of capital reaped from female bodies. By opening up space beyond the circumscribed borders of towns, cities and countries through movement of the female body, both authors represent ways in which globalization shapes female subjectivities. This narrative technique also provides a visual representation for the transnational flow of capital, from Europe to Africa, procured from female bodies. Through their particularized spatial and temporal structures, both authors elucidate the intersecting historical, cultural and economic processes that interplay across space and time, setting the context for the forced prostitution of African women. In addition to the structural elements that govern Becoming Abigail and Beyond the Horizon , these texts present nuanced depictions of female bodies. Both Abani and Darko investigate the intersecting physical and psychological impacts of violence and forced prostitution on African women in the Diaspora. They spare no details in describing the searing pain of broken bones and wounded skin, as well as the violation, humiliation and shame of their protagonists. Many third world and postcolonial critics look at violence, particularly sexual violence, enacted on female bodies. In particular, Akosua Adomako Ampofo examines how ambiguous interpretations of law facilitate the 4 use of rape and domestic violence to discipline Ghanaian women in her article, “Controlling and Punishing Women: Violence Against Ghanaian Women.” Amina Mama takes a different approach in “Sheroes and Villains,” connecting present-day violence against African women to the continent’s colonized past. Very few critics, however, examine what happens to the material body after periods of violence. I engage this critical gap by exploring how females use their bodies to fight against their abusers and deploy their corporeality to reconstitute subjectivity in the aftermath of violence in the novels. What might it mean that the abused body also serves as the primary tool of resistance? I employ the thinking of contemporary body theorists, Elizabeth Grosz and Elaine Scarry and draw on Freud’s early psychoanalytic work to analyze how both Darko and Abani navigate this question. Though female bodies are in many ways manipulated, abused
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