The female residual and the female emergent in Okot Pp'bitek's Song of Lawino and Buchi Emecheta's Second-class Citizen

This thesis examines Okot p'Bitek's Song of Lawino (1966) and Buchi Emecheta's Second-Class Citizen (1974) through the Cultural Materialist approach. It utilizes Raymond Williams' discussions on the Structures of Feeling – namely Dominant, Residual and Emergent – in analyzing the characters and social and cultural spaces they inhabit. In this respect, it aims to analyze the representation of doubly-colonized African women – Lawino, Clementine (Song of Lawino) and Adah Obi (Second-Class Citizen) – in order to explore how they face the challenges of dominant British colonial realities, patriarchal values and disruption of African cultural customs. A comparative outlook of these three female characters brings in clear differences between the forms of residue and emergence. Despite having different residual and emergent approaches toward colonial operations, the common point is their doubly-colonized status, which will be examined through Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's discussions on the Subaltern. This thesis aims to prove that African women's voices are problematized within the depths of the patriarchal social hierarchy. It claims that it is unclear whether or not their unheard voices could ever question patriarchal colonial values to offer any freedom of speech to themselves.