African Migrant Women’s Agency in the Diaspora

This article examines the agency of African migrant women in the diaspora context in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah. Existing scholarship indicates the entanglement of black women’s marginalisation with racism, a victim-focused perception of black women, and a deliberate erasure of black women’s experiences and identities in the diaspora. This necessitates an exploration of how African migrant women define themselves in relation to black identity and racial hierarchies in the diaspora. I argue that African migrant women’s experiences and identities are complex and fluid. Despite facing marginalisation and victimisation, African migrant women actively assert their agency and multifaceted identities. Drawing on Nnaemeka’s concepts of Nego-feminism and reinscription of womanhood, I explore how African migrant women’s agency is both negotiated and relational – a strategic response to racist marginalisation of black identity, enacted through their interpersonal relationship as casual workers and lovers in the diaspora. Using narrative qualitative research design, data was collected through close reading of both primary and secondary texts, and analysed through textual and narrative analysis, and coding methods. The findings reveal that African migrant women negotiate white women, white men, and African Americans’ stereotypical perceptions of their black identity. First, African migrant women adapt discursive silence to understand the mechanisms of their marginalisation. Second, they embrace complex forms of self-inscription to outrightly resist misnaming, dismissive, and downplaying tendencies of white American racism. Third, they strategically adapt male sponsorship to achieve vertical social mobility. This study provides insights into how African migrant women’s agency operates in white American racist contexts, counters the one-dimensional portrayal of African migrant women as victims, and contributes to the broader discourse on women’s struggle for social justice and representation of their experiences.