Gendering the transnational: history, migration and material culture in Zoe Wicomb's The One That Got Away and Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie's The Thing Around Your Neck

This paper analyses how selected stories from Zoe Wicomb's The One That Got Away (2008) and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's The Thing Around Your Neck (2009) explore transnational migration from women's perspectives. The paper explores how the African woman migrant's experiences allow alternative readings of migrant existence. Significantly present in the stories analysed in this paper are cultural and historical artefacts that protagonists engage with in ways that offer new perspectives on cultures and histories that such objects represent. Drawing on post-colonial readings of migration, material culture and the exotic, I posit that, through migrant women's stories, Wicomb and Adichie offer unconventional readings of transnational experience that unsettle the meanings of the objects, histories and cultures encountered in transnational spaces.