| In this project I examine how the transnational business of forced prostitution shapes the diasporic African female experience in Chris Abani's, Becoming Abigail and Amma Darko's, Beyond the Horizon. 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?;While many third world and postcolonial critics look at violence, particularly sexual violence, enacted on female bodies, very few examine what happens to the material body after periods of violence. In addition to looking at what happens to the material body as a result of violence, I am also interested in looking at how females use their bodies to reconstitute subjectivity in the aftermath of violence. I am similarly invested in examining what it might mean that the abused body is also the primary tool of resistance. Body theorist, Elizabeth Grosz asserts that the body, "as well as being the site of knowledge-power," or subject to exterior constructions, is "also a site of resistance," for it "always entails the possibility of a counterstrategic reinscription, for it is capable of being self-marked, self-represented in alternative ways" (238). I'd like to look at how dressing the body, enacting physical violence against perpetrators, voluntary sexual acts and self-mutilation function as forms of resistance in Becoming Abigail and Beyond the Horizon. Ultimately, I would also like to look at whether the use of bodies may plant the seeds for some kind of transcultural female connection. In chapters devoted to the individual novels, I use theories of globalization, feminism and post-colonialism to examine how the transnational business of forced prostitution is produced; then I utilize body theory, feminism and some psychoanalytic theory to look at the ways in which female bodies function as modes of resistance. |
