The discursive scaling of Black womanhood: Experiences of African immigrant women in the African diaspora

Wawire, Gorrety Nafula

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Description

Title

The discursive scaling of Black womanhood: Experiences of African immigrant women in the African diaspora

Author(s)

Wawire, Gorrety Nafula

Issue Date

2023-11-22

Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)

Smalls, Krystal

Doctoral Committee Chair(s)

Smalls, Krystal

Committee Member(s)

• Koven, Michele
• Bhatt, Rakesh
• Ibrahim, Awad

Department of Study

Linguistics

Discipline

Linguistics

Degree Granting Institution

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Degree Level

Dissertation

Keyword(s)

• (African immigrant women
• scale
• diasporic identity formation
• intersectionality
• Black feminist solidarity
• discourse analysis
• critical ethnography)

Abstract

This dissertation examines how a multiethnic transnational group of women name and describe ethnic and cultural differences and how they come to know themselves as Black women, mothers, and community caregivers. Based on 3 years of immersive critical ethnographic fieldwork and narrative analysis, this research specifically focuses on the ways African women negotiate and scale their gendered and racialized identities with Black women from other parts of the world. While many studies have examined relations between language and race and even more have looked at language and gender, not enough attention has been dedicated to the relationship between language, race, and gender how they shape the experiences of immigrants in the U.S. African diaspora. This study falls under the area study raciolinguistics as defined by Alim, Rickford, & Ball (2016). The study presents critical ethnographic and interactional analyses of politically, culturally, and socially situated conversations, which allows us to see the different stances social actors enact to construct meanings about race that intersect with gender and social actor’s migration experiences. I specifically explore how the women employ a range of discursive practices to construct a ‘complex solidarity’ shaped by their lived experiences. Secondly, I explore how women make race and are racialized and how this racialization informs their experiences in mothering Black children in the United States. Lastly, the study examines ‘motherhood' and 'care work' as critical sites for promoting the continuity of Black communities and life in the African diaspora. As this work shows, a nuanced understanding of the women's racialized and gendered practices requires examining their lived experiences and how they are linked to larger social, cultural, and political structures.

Graduation Semester

2023-12

Type of Resource

Thesis

Handle URL

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/122229

Copyright and License Information

Copyright 2023 Gorrety Wawire

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