Mrs Diweng Dafong

The University of Alabama

Bio

Diweng Mercy Dafong is a graduate teaching assistant in the Department of Modern Languages and Classics at the University of Alabama. She founded the Femigritude Literary Lab, a platform that encourages young African girls to write as a form of healing. Her research focuses on how female writers and filmmakers from Burkina Faso are shaping public perceptions of migration and (in)security.

We Need New Homes: Femigritude Writers Reimagining Return

Abstract

Ernest Cole's Migration and Return frames return to Africa as constructive, but builds this claim almost entirely on male migrant experience. This article develops femigritude, a gendered framework reading African women's migration narratives as political agency, arguing that an undertheorized moral economy governs women's return. Reading Fatou Diome, Calixthe Beyala, Aminata Sow Fall, and Monique Ilboudo, this article shows that return is judged not by economic success but by reproductive status and marital respectability.