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Mansouri Y, Bordbari Z, Sharif N. Cognitive Colonization and Gendered Identity in Buchi Emecheta’s Second-Class Citizen and The Joys of Motherhood. JCALS 2026; 3 (1) : 5
URL: http://cals.gonbad.ac.ir/article-1-76-en.html

Cognitive Colonization and Gendered Identity in Buchi Emecheta’s Second-Class Citizen and The Joys of Motherhood

Yalda Mansouri

, Zahra Bordbari

, Negar Sharif

Faculty of Foreign Languages, CT.C., Islamic Azad University, Tehran, Iran

Abstract: (65 Views)

This article reads Buchi Emecheta’s Second-Class Citizen and The Joys of Motherhood in the light of a cognitive postcolonial framework , arguing that colonial domination depends not only on material conditions but also persists as internalized emotional and cognitive schemas linked to gendered divisions of labor. Drawing on Patrick Colm Hogan’s account of practical identity and situated emotion, Frantz Fanon’s theorization of psychological colonization, and Suzanne Keen’s notion of strategic empathy, the study demonstrates that Emecheta figures womanhood not as a stable social category but as a dynamic cognitive process shaped by affective memory, moral expectation, and habitual reasoning. In Second-Class Citizen, Adah’s diasporic journey exposes how colonial promises unravel into cognitive dissonance, where racialized marginalization reshapes ambition, self-assessment, and one’s sense of belonging. Thus, in The Joys of Motherhood, domination unfolds within a domestic ideology that causes mothering to be synonymous with both cognitive mires and confinement, supported by collective judgment and emotional duty. If Nnu Ego acts as a psychic form of patriarchal practical identity, Adaku represents a radical break from conventional thinking by refusing to treat reproduction as something that gives person value or social worth. By placing emotional memory and narrative management of empathy at its center, this article repositions Emecheta’s fiction as how minds and identities are influenced or controlled by external forces, and how people resist that control. In doing so, it argues that decolonization in these texts appears as a reshaping of perception, affect, and self-understanding as much as an overt political reversal.

Article number: 5

Keywords: Cognitive, Empathy, Emotion, Postcolonial, Practical Identity

Type of Study: Research | Subject: General
Received: 2025/08/25 | Accepted: 2025/10/19 | Published: 2026/01/1

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