ABSTRACT
This chapter turns to a literary text, Buchi Emecheta’s 1974 novel Second Class Citizen, to explore how the regulatory powers of the postwar British welfare state established the terms of belonging for black and Asian migrant women. In its depiction of Adah, a young Nigerian woman’s tumultuous marriage and experience of motherhood in 1960s London, the novel offers extensive representations of social democratic programs (council housing, the National Health Service [NHS], public casework, and counseling) and their impact upon newly arrived immigrant communities. Emecheta figures the intimate space of an NHS hospital maternity ward as a potential site of belonging between mothers of different races and backgrounds. Yet she ultimately describes how the welfare state’s reassertion of colonial hierarchies of race, and its stigmatization of women who fall short of prescribed standards of normative womanhood, preempt that sense of belonging as a result. I argue that Second Class Citizen identifies alternative possibilities for belonging in the novel’s recurring flashbacks to Adah’s mother and her involvement in unofficial communities of care among women in late-colonial Nigeria.
