Gendered Commodification and Transnational Displacement in on Black Sisters' Street

Globalization and its attendant challenges have intensified the movement of peoples across social, economic, and political borders, giving rise to diverse forms of migration and the formation of diasporic communities. This phenomenon has attracted sustained scholarly attention across disciplines such as anthropology, literary criticism, religion, economics, and the visual arts. Within literary studies, diaspora narratives have become crucial sites for interrogating issues of identity, displacement, belonging, and survival in transnational spaces. This study explores the functionality of commodity in diaspora narratives through a critical reading of Chika Unigwe’s On Black Sisters’ Street. Drawing on postcolonial and materialist theoretical frameworks, the paper examines how human bodies, especially female bodies, are commodified within global circuits of migration and sex trafficking. The analysis reveals that commodification operates not only as an economic mechanism but also as a narrative strategy that exposes systemic exploitation, gendered vulnerability, and the unequal power relations embedded in global capitalism. The study concludes that Unigwe’s novel foregrounds the intersection of migration, gender, and market logic, thereby challenging readers to confront the human costs of global mobility and economic desire.