Beyond External Colonialism: Intra-Societal Tensions and Female Consciousness in Buchi Emecheta’s Second Class Citizen

Abstract
Introduction: Buchi Emecheta’s novel Second-Class Citizen has been interpreted through the lenses of racial discrimination, migration, and the colonial relationship between the colonizer and the colonized. While these perspectives are essential for understanding the broader historical context of the novel, an exclusive focus on external oppression risks overlooking the complex intra communal dynamics that shape the lived experiences of its female protagonist, Adah. This study aims to move beyond the framework of external colonial domination by examining how everyday interactions within family structures, marital relationships, and intra community networks reproduce forms of gendered inequality. Drawing on a cognitive postcolonial approach, the article explores how social expectations, emotional responses, and internalized social categories influence the formation of Adah’s subjectivity and her gradual development of female consciousness.
Background of the Study:
Scholarship on Buchi Emecheta’s Second-Class Citizen often highlights Adah’s experiences with racism and economic hardship in Britain, focusing on external structural inequalities. Authors like Marie Umeh and M.J. Daymond suggest these analyses can sometimes overlook the significant intra-communal patriarchal pressures that shape Adah’s life. Nancy Topping Bazin and Gomatam Mohana Charyulu also present the complexities of navigating societal expectations within the community. Emecheta illustrates how oppression mirrors through mechanisms of moral judgment and social surveillance, a perspective explored by Donna Haraway. However, while all these reseraches focus on social and structural dimensions of Adah’s struggles, they pay less attention to the emotional and psychological aspects through which such pressures are internalized in her everyday life. The gradual accumulation of feelings such as exhaustion, shame, and emotional strain—produced through constant negotiation with family, community, and social expectations—remains relatively underexplored. The protagonist’s journey through childhood discrimination, marital struggles, motherhood, and professional challenges, as examined by researchers such as Bahmanpour, Nejadmohammad & Jabbari Khameneh, and Lennard J. Davis, highlights how deep and effective society’s beliefs about gender roles are. Emecheta complicates simple binaries of oppressor and oppressed, offering a portrayal of postcolonial female experience as a layered process of simultaneous domination and resistance. This study builds on existing scholarship by shifting attention to the internal, lived experience of social pressure in Second Class Citizen. By focusing on Patrick Colm Hogan’s cognitive–postcolonial framework, it shows how Adah’s emotional life, memory, and sense of self is developed in response to these pressures.