Automobility and Ethical (In)justice: Reading Cars in Ama Ata Aidoo’s Changes: A Love Story

This literary exploration of African women’s automobility practices takes the car as a site of inquiry into gender dynamics in Ama Ata Aidoo’s novel, Changes: A Love Story. It engages the car as a category of mobile infrastructure that is gendered, class-oriented, and a cultural signifier. The car is positioned as an infrastructure invested with deeper meanings beyond its physical presence, thus it provides the primary medium for understanding the intersections of patriarchal power, gendered mobility constraints, and ethical justice issues within the Ghanian setting. Employing interdisciplinary conceptualisations of automobility, the paper argues that the car signifies on multiple levels, serving as a site of gender conflict, as baits, gifts, space for female bonding, and “epiphanic” moments, as well as a space of security, self-preservation, identity, and independence. Its multiple symbolisations heighten the importance of Automobility poetics as well as the complex intersections of gender identities and patriarchal power. The paper argues for Automobility poetics specific to African literary productions. It advances critical considerations for Automobility practices of women within their cultural context, asserting that a woman’s quest for mobility often initiates resistance to injustice.