*Originally recorded September 25, 2026*
Global Friday Presents
Dr. Uchechukwu Umezurike
Associate Professor, Department of English
University of Calgary
Abstract: This paper offers a way of thinking about the relationship between home and bodies, especially the migrant body. It asks: what does it mean to construct one’s body as a home, or to think of home in terms of bodies? How does this shift the conventional understanding of home, which is often tied to privilege, power, and access–whether political, economic, or social? In addressing these questions, it examines Francesca Ekwuyasi’s Butter Honey Pig Bread to show how, for some African immigrants in Canada, home is lived, felt, and remembered through the body. The paper resists a vision of home tied to a fixed geographic or national space and instead frames it as bodily, affective, and vulnerable.
Bio: Uchechukwu Peter Umezurike is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Calgary, Canada. He is the author of Masculinities in Nigerian Fiction: Receptivity and Gender (2025) and of literary works, including We Survived Until We Could Live (2026), there’s more (2023), Double Wahala, Double Trouble (2021), and a co-editor of Please Don’t Interrupt (2025).