The liminality of Identity of women in the Colonial Nigeria in Buchi Emecheta’s The Bride Price

Abstract

African feminism primarily argues that the representation of the African women in literature should be studied and analyzed, not only through the perspectives of Western feminist thought, but also with a great degree of cultural consciousness. In other words, any approach to the novels written by or representing African women must be aware that the perspectives promoted and discussed in the Western feminist discourse are mostly Eurocentric and therefore homogenizing and cannot be purely imported and imposed upon the culturally different African communities. Therefore, the reading of novels by female African authors is to be informed by the perspectives of African feminism which is obviously a sub-category of postcolonial thought. The present article demonstrates that in Buchi Emecheta’s The Bride Price, the Nigerian novelist, the cultural factors of the Igbo indigenity form integral parts of both the creative work of the novelists and the identity and life of their protagonists. These aspects are studied with regard to the broader context of the current of African feminism that generally is a subdivision of postcolonial feminism, represented by thinkers like Gayatri Chacrovarty Spivak and Chandra Talpade Mohanty.