Negotiating Tradition in a Globalised World: Women, Migration, and Identity in Buchi Emecheta's Second-Class Citizen

This paper critically examines the negotiation of tradition, gender, migration, and female identity in Buchi Emecheta’s Second-Class Citizen (1974), with particular attention to how transnational movement reshapes women’s encounters with cultural expectations and patriarchal power. Drawing on Transnational Feminist Theory and employing qualitative textual analysis and interpretive close reading, the study examines Adah’s experiences in Nigeria and Britain as a process of cultural negotiation rather than a simple transition from tradition to modernity. It argues that migration does not necessarily liberate women from patriarchal structures; rather, it relocates and reshapes gendered inequalities within new social, cultural, racial, and economic contexts. The analysis is organised around three interconnected dimensions: the formation of Adah’s agency and identity; education and employment as resources for self-determination; and marriage, motherhood, and family as institutions through which gendered authority is reproduced and contested. Close reading of episodes concerning Adah’s childhood, education, migration, racial exclusion, marriage, employment, and writing shows how Emecheta represents agency as gradual, situated, and negotiated. The paper demonstrates that Adah’s identity develops through the interaction of cultural inheritance, migration, race, class, family responsibility, and personal aspiration. Emecheta’s representation therefore remains significant for understanding African women’s transnational experiences and the complex relationship between mobility, cultural belonging, and autonomy.