Cruel optimisms and erotic economies: Feminist life-making beyond arrival in On Black Sisters’ Street

Abstract

For too long, critics of African women’s transnational literature have restricted discussions of displacement to a narrow lexicon of loss, a tendency that reduces migration’s complexity to tragedy and vulnerability. In this study, we move beyond this reductive grammar by re-interpreting On Black Sisters’ Street as an affective cartography of endurance, insurgent desire and feminist life-(re)making. Lauren Berlant’s cruel optimism, Elizabeth Povinelli’s economies of abandonment, Sylvia Tamale’s radical re-theorisation of the African female body and Obioma Nnaemeka’s nego-feminist ethics of negotiation provide important prisms through which refreshing insights can be engendered. We deploy these theories to re-interpret Unigwe’s erotic economies as embodied sites of political agency within intensely gendered, racialised and extractive circuits of global capitalism. We contend that the novel subverts conventional pathos by re-inscribing the sex worker’s body as a locus of epistemic knowing and defiant self-fashioning amid elaborate registers of cruelty and hope.
Contribution: On Black Sisters’ Street destabilises the trope of arrival as narrative closure to reimagine survival as a relentless, relational and gendered process of becoming. This reading repositions endurance as an African feminist ethic of life-making that reformulates female strength as a modern grammar of African transnational existence under neoliberal conditions.