The Pedagogies of Sex Trafficking Postcolonial Fiction: Consent, Agency, and Neoliberalism in Chika Unigwe’s On Black Sisters’ Street

Abstract

"where mass media largely relies on victimizing and disempowering tropes echoing abolitionist imagery ... postcolonial literary analyses tend to showcase and privilege moments of agency akin to pro-sex work rhetoric....  This article seeks to intervene precisely here by pointing to the inadequacy of traditionally invoked concepts such as “consent” and, tightly associated to it, “agency” as primary foci of analysis when explaining contexts that can allow for extreme exploitation such as transnational sex trafficking.... the anti-prostitution/abolitionist model has become emblematic of the mainstream fight against sex trafficking in the US.... In response, postcolonial scholars who are apprehensive about abolitionist policies that generally construct trafficked individuals as unable to act or speak in their best interest have tended to embrace the opposing camp’s rhetoric.... the latter position is not unproblematic either and needs to be examined, as it maintains the binary by only inverting hierarchies: where one stresses victimhood, the other highlights agency, sometimes at the expense of overlooking appallingly oppressive contexts.... In her award-winning novel On Black Sisters’ Street, the Nigerian-born writer Chika Unigwe clearly shows the pitfalls of transferring the analytical model that currently dominates the pro-sex work/anti-prostitution debates into, to borrow Homi Bhabha’s famous phrase, a similar but not quite framework."