Migration, Marriage and the Narrative of (Dis)location in African Short Stories

Kufre A. Akpan, Monica Udoette

Abstract


This paper interrogates marriage and family reunion not only as a strategic site of negotiating and mediating legibility of migrants, but also where residency and citizenship in their destination countries are politicised and contested in Chimamanda Adichie’s “Arrangers of Marriage”, a story in The Thing Around your Neck and some selected stories in Chika Unigwe’s Better Never than Late. As literary research, this paper relies on close reading and analysis of some extrapolations in some selected stories in the two collections, using Postcolonial concepts of ‘othering’ and unhomliness’. The study reveals that, order than its cardinal purposes of reunification and family formation, some migration marriages are fraught terrains for negotiating and formalising citizenship and permanent residency at migration destinations. It is against this backdrop that the paper concludes that migration processes could be regulated, if potential migrant couples are always made to prove the authenticity of their union, which could be detectable by examining their care-giving commitments and/ or procreation intentions.


Keywords


Marriage; Migration; Permanent residency; Short stories

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References


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DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3968/13087

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