Undocumented Futures: Afrofeminist Conviviality in Chika Unigwe's On Black Sisters' Street.

This article thinks with Chika Unigwe's On Black Sisters' Street (2009) to conceptualise "Afrofeminist conviviality" as a form of resistance that enables repair on two levels. Afrofeminist conviviality offers the possibility of preventing the trafficked sex worker's social death. It also gestures however provisionally towards the possibility of flourishing for the subaltern subject outside the liberal moralist binaries of free will and coercion. On Black Sisters' Street interweaves stories by four undocumented West African women trafficked from Lagos Nigeria to Antwerp Belgium. Afrofeminist conviviality can capture something of both the historical weight of resistance and the open-ended trajectory for the undocumented African sex worker towards less violent futures. It thus communicates a sense of becoming that is caring affirmative and recuperative while also being incomplete irregular and irreverent. On Black Sisters' Street allows for accounting the reparative possibilities for trafficked sex workers against the sheer cruelty of the global sex market. At the same time On Black Sisters' Street remains resolute in its hope for the thriving of the trafficked women in their undocumented futures however unauthorised informal and outlawed those may be. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]