ABSTRACT

African Feminism emerged as a movement to promote an African epistemological framework applicable to the lived experiences of African women in reaction to the theorization of their lived experiences by Western feminism. This critical ethnographic study uses an African feminist theoretical framework to explore how a group of female African immigrants living in a small, Midwestern town, perceive themselves in relationship to their portrayal in mainstream US media and how such portrayal impacts their everyday life. The findings reveal a gap between participants’ conceptualization of their selfhood and the ways in which they are represented in the US media, and thereby perceived in their host culture. While participants hold a positive image of themselves as “African,” they are negatively represented and perceived as the “cultural exotic Other” due to stereotyping, racism, and linguistic incompetence. Consequently, such negative portrayal results in social isolation in their host culture. In view of these findings, this study concludes with a call for a more systematic and critical reading of African women’s representations of the self in Western culture.