Papers by Elisabeth Bekers
6th Conference of the Society for Multi-Ethnic Studies: Europe and the Americas (MESEA): “Migration Matters: Immigration, Homelands, and Border Crossings in Europe And The Americas”, Jun 28, 2008
Journal of Postcolonial Writing
ABSTRACT Nigerian-born author Chika Unigwe situates a substantial part of her oeuvre in contempor... more ABSTRACT Nigerian-born author Chika Unigwe situates a substantial part of her oeuvre in contemporary, multicultural Belgium, a location rarely explored in postcolonial literatures despite its colonial history and sizable migrant communities. This article demonstrates how, in her short fiction and her novels The Phoenix (2007) and On Black Sisters’ Street (2009), Unigwe’s literary portraits of the country, based on the perceptions and experiences of Nigerian migrants living there, challenge traditional centre/periphery dichotomies. Her characters, who are mainly young Nigerian women, move across boundaries between Africa and Europe, the big city and the provincial town, the city centre and the suburbs, the touristic historic centre and the red-light district, their mobilities characteristic of contemporary globalized societies. The fictions are analysed to highlight the equivocality of centres and peripheries and the permeability of the borders that separate them, as well as the resilient mobility of Nigerian migrants in Belgium.
Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature
African American Studies Center, 2011
Black British Women’s Writing Conference: Tracing the Tradition and New Directions, Jul 9, 2014
35th African Literature Association Conference: Literature, the visual arts and globalization in Africa and its diaspora, Apr 18, 2009
Conference Panel "The Dynamics of Black British Women’s Literature in the 21st Century" at AfroEurope@ns IV: Black Cultures and Identities in Europe: Continental Shifts, Shifts in Perception, Oct 1, 2013
The Politics of Demonizing: the Other and the Anxieties of Globalization, 2010
32nd AFRICAN LITERATURE ASSOCIATION Conference: Pan-Africanism In the 21st Century: Generations In Creative Dialogue, May 17, 2006
... Een Knuppel in het boekenhok: Wij spreken pas als jullie luisteren, De Standaard (13 Octobe... more ... Een Knuppel in het boekenhok: Wij spreken pas als jullie luisteren, De Standaard (13 October 2004). Anbeek van der Meijden, AGH Het Vlaamse verschil, Dietsche Warande & Belfort 141 (1996): 199210. ... Jacobs, Herman. Bergen van leed, Knack (14 September 2005). ...
Challenging the Myth of Monologingualism, May 24, 2012
25th AFRICAN LITERATURE ASSOCIATION Conference: Continental North-South and Diaspora Connections and Linkages, 1999
Daughters of Africa W/Riting change: female genital excision in two African short-stories and in ... more Daughters of Africa W/Riting change: female genital excision in two African short-stories and in Alice Walker's "Possessing the secret of joy". Show full item record. Title: Daughters of Africa W/Riting change: female genital excision ...
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Papers by Elisabeth Bekers
Rising Anthills (the title refers to a Dogon myth) analyzes works in English, French, and Arabic by African and African American writers, both women and men, from different parts of the African continent and the diaspora. Attending closely to the nuances of language and the complexities of the issue, Bekers explores lesser-known writers side by side with such recognizable names as Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Flora Nwapa, Nawal El Saadawi, Ahmadou Kourouma, Calixthe Beyala, Alice Walker, and Gloria Naylor. Following their literary discussions of female genital excision, she discerns a gradual evolution—from the 1960s, when writers mindful of its communal significance carefully "wrote around" the physical operation, through the 1970s and 1980s, when they began to speak out against the practice and their societies' gender politics, to the late 1990s, when they situated their denunciations of female genital excision in a much broader, international context of women's oppression and the struggle for women's rights.