Sex work and the city: Liminal lives in Chika Unigwe’s On Black Sisters’ Street | Intellect Skip to content
1981
Night Stories: Urban Narratives of Migrant Lives in Europe
  • ISSN: 2040-4344
  • E-ISSN: 2040-4352

Abstract

Chika Unigwe’s 2007 novel centres on the lives of four women illegally trafficked from Nigeria to the sex district of Antwerp. Documenting how these characters negotiate the dark spaces of the city, Unigwe highlights the structural inequalities and legislative failures that keep these women in a state of exception. The novel offers a portrait of the contemporary city and the precarious position of those locked out of legal protection of the state. This article focuses on the urban spaces of Sisi, Efe, Joyce and Ama, and how they become commodities of underground migration system. Visible in the windows of the red-light district each night, they are considered persona non-grata by the legal infrastructure that fails to protect them.

This article is Open Access under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence (CC BY-NC-ND), which allows users to copy, distribute and transmit the article as long as the author is attributed, the article is not used for commercial purposes, and the work is not modified or adapted in any way. To view a copy of the licence, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
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2022-04-01
2024-04-19
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