Otherness in buchi emecheta’s second-class citizen: A postcolonial rendering

Abstract

—In postcolonial discourse, the concept of the “Other” represents someone who carries dark human traits such as stigmatization, subjugation, domination, socio-political or cultural misrepresentation. The “Other” represents one of the main postcolonial concepts in literary studies because there is indisputable evidence that the term is a colonial construct. In essence, colonialism has left a permanent mark in the minds of the colonized people and this imprint has significantly manifested in literature. This analysis, thus, ai ms to explore how the colonial “Other” is represented in Second-Class Citizen (1974), one of the prominent postcolonial novels written by Buchi Emecheta, an author from the colonized African society. This study adopts textual analysis in which context-oriented technique is used to understand the character traits of the colonial “Other” in the two selected texts. The analysis draws upon Postcolonial theory, particularly Edward Said’s Orientalist approach. We show that Emecheta represents the colonial “Other” as backward, inferior, and of lower social class. Also, this representation is based on economic and socio-cultural differences as well as conflictual relationships between African indigenous people and British citizens.