Writing an(Other) Europe: Challenging peripheries in Chika Unigwe’s fiction on Belgium

Abstract

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.