Women And The City In Cyprian Ekwensi's Jagua Nana

Résumé: Generally speaking, the postcolonial city inherited Western urbanization and modernization that have given women a relative freedom and helped them to change positions in their society. This research examines the representation of Lagos City in Cyprian Ekwensi's Jagua Nana and displays the lives and experiences of individuals, particularly women characters within it. In other words, it investigates the relationship between women and the city and how they influence each other. To do so, this study uses different approaches such as postcolonialism and feminism-that can be called urban feminism. First, it shows the characteristics of the postcolonial city at two main levels: the physical and the social. The reader learns about those characteristics through the daily details of women life, especially through the eyes of Jagua Nana. Moreover, it sheds light on women roles, social positions, political engagement, and economic contribution - and more importantly it focuses on the theme of prostitution, not as a social moral problem, but as an economic tactic that leads sometimes to women empowerment in an urban setting. Finally, this study comes out with the idea that there exists a bound relation between the city and the woman in Jagua Nana. It concludes that the city can be compared to a woman more than a mere setting in the novel.

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