ABSTRACT
Although migration and settlement consistently follow gender sensitive patterns, the factors that motivate women’s migration, the challenges they face in their various new homelands, and most importantly the manner in which they reconfigure their identities in new diaspora, remain ancillary to the analyses of male experiences. This chapter provides a preliminary interrogation into African women’s experiences of reconstituting identities in a Canadian context. Although men and women immigrants share common ground in grappling with self and community in a new homeland, the experience is in many ways uniquely gendered. Most importantly, women’s roles within and outside the family often position them uniquely in the transnational process, especially with regards to redefining social identities and recreating a home. In their capacity as caregivers, educators and ritual overseers, women embody the cultural identity of their group and are responsible for enacting and transmitting this identity. These women’s struggles with new and recreated identities, the difficult terrains in which they wrestle, and the forms of networking and relationships emerging from their everyday lived experiences, could provide important insights into where African identities are going in the new diaspora. Such qualitative insights into identity building provide the key to forging relevant concepts and proper contexts for new African identities in a globalising world.
