A pedagogy of weaving Nigerian Tiv a’nger into life writing, mobility and place: my travelling encounters as an international student retold

Abstract

This pedagogy of weaving the Nigerian Tiv a'nger into life writing, mobility and place blends in my experiences, cultures, geographical locations and stories. As I travel through and within countries as an international student, I draw from postcolonial and feminist scholars such as Anzaldua (1987), Bhabba (1994), Rushdie (2011) and Trinh (1994) in negotiating a hybrid space where my sense of belonging and home is continuously unsettled and negotiated. In this thesis, I use the a’nger as a metaphor for blending, merging and blurring text, identities, and questioning the conditions which produce stories, memories and events. In this auto/ethno/graphic pedagogy of weaving the Tiv a'nger into my encounters as a traveller, sojourner and mother, I am seeking to link my cultural background with my scholarship in the faculty of education and the faculty of law as a literary metissage that allows me to situate my narrative within broader sociopolitical discourses that query gender race and class issues (hooks, 2003; Fanon, 2008). I am guided by a desire to show that stories are research and that stories influence our movements as Africans in diaspora (Achebe, 1973; Wa Thiong’o, 1986). In drawing from the stories of my Tiv ancestors through African indigenous a’nger, I am guided by a quest to decolonize a space in academia to include other ways of knowing and being in the world. In retelling my stories, I open up conversations about the experiences of international students from Africa who relocate to other countries in the quest for continuous education. I use qualitative research methodologies such as auto/ethno/graphy (Douglas & Carless, 2013), bricolage (Kincheloe, 2005), metissage (Lionnet, 1991), multimodality (Morawski et al., 2016); and life writing (Hasebe-Ludt, Chambers & Leggo, 2009) to linger, tarry and trouble the sites between history and culture, home and abroad, us and them.