Contestations of nationhood and belonging in contemporary African women travel writing

Abstract

Contemporary African travel writing produces interesting possibilities redefining the directions of the genre. One of these promises manifests in how the crisis of nationhood and belonging impacts subjects’ navigation of sites of travel. African travel narratives by women foreground fractured intimacies encumbering journeys, especially when subjects travel «home». Such texts extensively grapple with the complexities of negotiating the personal and the collective in a bid to unravel belonging. This article examines two travelogues by African women: Leah Chishugi’s A Long Way from Paradise: Surviving the Rwandan Genocide and Noo Saro-Wiwa’s Looking for Transwonderland: Travels in Nigeria as explorations of how reading precarities of nationhood through embodied travel re-imagines private journeys as a means to tease out public anxieties of nationhood and belonging. In the process of narrating precarious journeys, African women complicate the travelogue into a political statement of belonging and its paradoxes.