Journal of Critical Applied Linguistics Studies

en Cognitive Colonization and Gendered Identity in Buchi Emecheta’s Second-Class Citizen and The Joys of Motherhood عمومى General پژوهشي Research 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.   Cognitive, Empathy, Emotion, Postcolonial, Practical Identity 0 0 http://cals.gonbad.ac.ir/browse.php?a_code=A-10-91-1&slc_lang=en&sid=1 Yalda Mansouri yalda.mansouri6320@iau.ir 1003194753284600658 1003194753284600658 No Department of English Languages, CT.C., Islamic Azad University, Tehran, Iran Zahra Bordbari bordbari@riau.ac.ir 1003194753284600659 1003194753284600659 Yes Faculty of Foreign Languages, CT.C., Islamic Azad University, Tehran, Iran Negar Sharif neg.sharif@iau.ac.ir 1003194753284600660 1003194753284600660 No Faculty of Foreign Languages, CT.C., Islamic Azad University, Tehran, Iran