MIGRATION AND A DECONSTRUCTIONIST VIEW OF MODERN SLAVERY IN UNIGWE CHIKA'S ON BLACK SISTERS' STREET

Contemporary African migration narratives increasingly reveal the intricate relationship between migration and modern slavery, particularly as transnational mobility is mediated by economic precarity, gendered exploitation, and unequal global power relations. This paper examines Chika Unigwe's On Black Sisters' Street through the lens of Jacques Derrida's deconstruction, with the aim of interrogating how the novel destabilises dominant assumptions about migration and modern slavery. Drawing on five deconstructionist principles – subverting hierarchies, the marginalised "Other," the critique of subjectivity, the aporia of agency, and linguistic imperialism – the study undertakes a close textual analysis of the novel. The analysis demonstrates that Unigwe resists linear victimhood narratives by exposing the contradictions that underlie conventional binaries such as freedom/slavery, victim/agent, home/exile, legality/illegality, and empowerment/exploitation. The findings are that migration is represented not as a singular route to liberation or oppression but as an unstable and ideologically mediated process in which hope and coercion, choice and necessity, identity and displacement continuously intersect. Similarly, modern slavery emerges as a fluid, relational condition sustained by socio-economic inequalities, patriarchal structures, and transnational systems of power rather than as a fixed criminal phenomenon. The study concludes that On Black Sisters' Street deconstructs dominant discourses surrounding migration and human trafficking by foregrounding ambiguity, multiplicity, and the instability of meaning. It therefore argues that a deconstructionist reading extends existing scholarship beyond predominantly sociological, feminist, and postcolonial interpretations by illuminating the textual mechanisms through which migration and modern slavery are problematised. The study contributes to African literary criticism by demonstrating the value of deconstruction for rethinking contemporary migration narratives and the complex politics of power, identity, and exploitation. Keywords: Deconstruction; Migration; Modern Slavery; On Black Sisters' Street.