Paper short abstract:

The paper reads Nicole Amarteifio’s characters in the web series An African City as rebranding the concept of morality, disentangling it from sexual chastity, and challenging (re)presentations of women in urban contexts having a flawed sense of morality.

Paper long abstract:

This paper aims to explore Nicole Amarteifio's web series An African City (2014-present) delving into the politics of self-empowerment and sexual agency. An African City offers a rich and multifaceted insight into the lives of five female returnees re-discovering themselves and seeking professional success as they find their way in the modern lifestyle of Accra, a city represented both as dominated by patriarchal morals and as a cosmopolitan place with business opportunities for young entrepreneurs. I propose to analyze An African City in terms of rejecting rigid patterns of representation and (de)moralization of African women in urban contexts, for its characters resist categorizations into unique or essentialized forms of identity. Thus, I study Amarteifio's characters in terms of their embodying independence, sexual liberation, and personal aspirations beyond being mothers and wives.

The focus will be on the characters' conception of the self, for each woman reveals different social concerns as well as different strategies for effective self-assertion and self-definition. As independent intelligent business women each of them faces and embraces sexuality from a different standpoint, questioning the concept of morality and disentangling it from sexual chastity as they adopt different perspectives in what regards body politics. The characters' multifaceted approaches towards sexual agency marks them as metonymic representations of different modes of femaleness in Africa. In this sense, An African City also reveals itself as a polyphonic narrative displaying different social responses towards women's claiming ownership of their body and the renegotiation of the concept of morality.