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Multiculturalism and the immigrant “Irish woman” after the Celtic Tiger: marginalisation, gender-based violence and family dysfunction in Ebun Akpoveta’s Trapped: Prison Without Walls

2015; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 24; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/09670882.2015.1112994

1469-9303

Asier Altuna García de Salazar,

Irish and British Studies

This article breaks new ground in examining how “new Irish” immigrant women have responded to the collapse of Ireland’s Celtic Tiger economy and the different forms of gender discrimination and marginalisation they face both within their minority ethnic communities and the Irish host society. It approaches Ebun Akpoveta’s Trapped: Prison Without Walls (2013) as an exemplary work of fiction which exposes unresolved injustices and inequalities suffered by immigrant women. Akpoveta creates a narrative that complicates previous representations of cultural encounters between newcomers and long-established members of Ireland’s host society, not least because her Nigerian female protagonist arrives as a postgraduate student rather than an asylum seeker or refugee. She fictionalises female experiences of marginalisation, gender-based violence and family dysfunction within an all-Nigerian family that outwardly appears to be a model of integration and social inclusion in an open and welcoming Irish multicultural society.