Undocumented Futures: Afrofeminist conviviality in Chika Unigwe’s On Black Sisters’ Street

Abstract

This article reads Chika Unigwe’s On Black Sisters’ Street (2009) alongside what I call Afrofeminist conviviality as a form of resistance that enables repair on two levels. It defers the trafficked sex worker’s social death, ensnared in the politics of undocumented labour migration and modern slavery. It also gestures, however provisionally, towards the possibility of flourishing for the subaltern subject outside the liberal, moralist binaries of freewill and coercion. On Black Sisters’ Street interweaves stories by four undocumented West African women trafficked across the Black Atlantic, from Lagos, Nigeria, to Antwerp, Belgium. Afrofeminist conviviality can capture something of both the historical weight of resistance and the trajectorial elasticity for the undocumented African sex worker towards less violent futures.

It, thus, communicates a sense of becoming that is caring, affirmative and recuperative, while being incomplete, irregular and irreverent. Thinking with Afrofeminist conviviality in On Black Sister’s Street allows for accounting the reparative possibilities for the trafficked sex workers against the sheer cruelty of the global sex market. At the same time, On Black Sisters’ Street remains resolutely fugitivist in its hope for the thriving of the trafficked women in their undocumented futures, however unauthorised, informal and outlawed those may be.