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Author: Ademola Adesola
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1666954500
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 237
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Book Description
In Representations of Child Soldiers in Contemporary African Narratives, Ademola Adesola examines the dominant factors that writers privilege in their portrayals of child soldiering in sub-Saharan Africa. In his textual-interpretive analyses of selected novels in the African child soldier genre, Adesola contends that critical discussions of African child soldier literature have depended on the interpretive frameworks supplied by Western humanitarian discourses which oversimplify and de-historicize experiences of war in Africa. The author argues that such reductive decontextualization of war realities serve to champion a narrow vision of war in African contexts centered on a moral and humanitarian urge for Western intervention. Regardless of whether the casus belli legitimating those wars are genuine or not, those conflicts (and children’s involvement in them) are understood within the same racist colonial and ethnocentric stereotypes about Africa that have been privileged in Western thought and the Western moral-political imagination for centuries. Thus, in studying African child soldier narratives, this book provides an alternative reading of novels whose settings feature African ethnopolitical conflicts – such as in Sierra Leone, Liberia, Congo-Brazzaville, Nigeria – notable for their exploitation of children for military ends. The author maintains that these works are significant in the varying ways they reify and challenge the Western ideas of “child” and “childhood,” as well as privilege child soldiers as social actors whose intricate makeups disavow being simply understood as innocent victims or irredeemable perpetrators of atrocities.
Author: Ademola Adesola
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1666954500
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 237
Get Book Here
Book Description
In Representations of Child Soldiers in Contemporary African Narratives, Ademola Adesola examines the dominant factors that writers privilege in their portrayals of child soldiering in sub-Saharan Africa. In his textual-interpretive analyses of selected novels in the African child soldier genre, Adesola contends that critical discussions of African child soldier literature have depended on the interpretive frameworks supplied by Western humanitarian discourses which oversimplify and de-historicize experiences of war in Africa. The author argues that such reductive decontextualization of war realities serve to champion a narrow vision of war in African contexts centered on a moral and humanitarian urge for Western intervention. Regardless of whether the casus belli legitimating those wars are genuine or not, those conflicts (and children’s involvement in them) are understood within the same racist colonial and ethnocentric stereotypes about Africa that have been privileged in Western thought and the Western moral-political imagination for centuries. Thus, in studying African child soldier narratives, this book provides an alternative reading of novels whose settings feature African ethnopolitical conflicts – such as in Sierra Leone, Liberia, Congo-Brazzaville, Nigeria – notable for their exploitation of children for military ends. The author maintains that these works are significant in the varying ways they reify and challenge the Western ideas of “child” and “childhood,” as well as privilege child soldiers as social actors whose intricate makeups disavow being simply understood as innocent victims or irredeemable perpetrators of atrocities.
Author: Ademola Oladipupo Adesola
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
This dissertation examines the representations of African child soldiers in selected contemporary African narratives with a view to mapping the dominant factors that writers privilege in their depictions of child soldiering in sub-Saharan Africa. In its engagement with the African child soldier genre, this study posits that critical discussions of African child soldier literature have depended on the interpretive frameworks supplied by Western humanitarian discourses which oversimplify and de-historicize experiences of war in Africa. Such reductive decontextualizations of war realities, I argue, serve to champion a narrow vision of war in African contexts centred on a moral and humanitarian urge for Western intervention. Regardless of whether the casus belli legitimating those wars are genuine or not, those conflicts (and children's involvement in them) are understood within the same racist colonial and ethnocentric stereotypes about Africa that have been privileged in Western thought and the Western moral-political imagination for centuries. Thus, in studying African child soldier narratives, I focus on novels whose settings feature African ethnopolitical conflicts - such as in Sierra Leone, Liberia, Congo-Brazzaville, Nigeria - notable for their exploitation of children for military ends. I maintain that these works are significant in the varying ways they reify and challenge the Western ideas of "child" and "childhood," as well as privilege child soldiers as social actors whose intricate makeups disavow being simply understood as innocent victims or irredeemable perpetrators of atrocities. Moreover, I contend that these works also participate in age-old Afropessimistic depictions of a homogenous Africa where it is dangerous to be children, where human lives have no meaning, and where wars are waged senselessly. Overall, my textual-interpretive analyses of the selected novels in this study emphasize the importance of some works belonging to the African child soldier canon to ongoing campaigns against the mobilization of child soldiers and the rehabilitation processes employed by international organizations and transnational NGOs concerned with children at war. In this regard, my critique of African child soldier narratives reveals that the understanding of prewar conditions is vital to initiating viable policies for the protection of children.
Author: Kaelyn Kaoma
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
This dissertation interrogates the newly prominent figure of the child soldier in African literature. I examine a number of recent texts narrating the child soldier experience, both memoir (Ishmael Beah, Emmanuel Jal, China Keitetsi, Senait Mehari, Grace Akallo, Tchicaya Missamou, Niromi de Soyza) and fiction (Uzodinma Iweala, Ahmadou Kourouma, Emmanuel Dongala, Chris Abani). The anthropologist David Rosen argues that the contemporary Western humanitarian narrative often makes an automatic assumption of innocence based on age that is not necessarily applicable in non-Western cultures. The danger of imposing such Western frameworks on non-Western cultures is that it risks engaging in the same colonial tropes of paternalism towards the native â childâ that were used to maintain dominance over colonized populations. Yet the hunger for narratives that portray the child soldier as an innocent victim who eventually is rescued and rehabilitated, as well as the fact that child soldier narratives are almost purely an African genre (even though there are substantial numbers of child soldiers in Asia, South America and the Middle East) suggests the kind of Orientalism that Edward Said warned us against: a desire to see Africa specifically as a place of violence and lost innocence that can be redeemed through Western intervention. This study takes a comparative approach, contextualizing the current literary trope of depicting the child soldier as lost innocent by comparing these contemporary narratives to a range of other texts. Chapter One examines the striking parallels between child soldier narratives and antebellum American slave narratives. Chapter Two juxtaposes child soldier narratives to the very different portrayal of South African youth involved in the militarized anti-apartheid movement. Chapter Three compares child soldier narratives to three texts narrating the experiences of young adult soldiers in the Zimbabwean war of liberation. Chapter Four questions why the child soldier is almost invariably imagined as African, while analyzing the one real exception to this rule, Niromi de Soyza's Tamil Tigress. Ultimately, through its examination of literary representations, my dissertation exposes the category of (African) child soldiers as highly problematic, allowing us to reconsider implicit myths of childhood and human rights.
Author: Mia T. Best
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : African literature
Languages : en
Pages : 386
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Book Description
Author: Uzodinma Iweala
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0061844543
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 178
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Book Description
“Remarkable. . . . Iweala never wavers from a gripping, pulsing narrative voice. . . . He captures the horror of ethnic violence in all its brutality and the vulnerability of youth in all its innocence.” —Entertainment Weekly (A) The harrowing, utterly original debut novel by Uzodinma Iweala about the life of a child soldier in a war-torn African country As civil war rages in an unnamed West-African nation, Agu, the school-aged protagonist of this stunning novel, is recruited into a unit of guerilla fighters. Haunted by his father’s own death at the hands of militants, which he fled just before witnessing, Agu is vulnerable to the dangerous yet paternal nature of his new commander. While the war rages on, Agu becomes increasingly divorced from the life he had known before the conflict started—a life of school friends, church services, and time with his family, still intact. As he vividly recalls these sunnier times, his daily reality continues to spin further downward into inexplicable brutality, primal fear, and loss of selfhood. In a powerful, strikingly original voice, Uzodinma Iweala leads the reader through the random travels, betrayals, and violence that mark Agu’s new community. Electrifying and engrossing, Beasts of No Nation announces the arrival of an extraordinary writer.
Author: David M Rosen
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 0813572894
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 211
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Book Description
When we hear the term “child soldiers,” most Americans imagine innocent victims roped into bloody conflicts in distant war-torn lands like Sudan and Sierra Leone. Yet our own history is filled with examples of children involved in warfare—from adolescent prisoner of war Andrew Jackson to Civil War drummer boys—who were once viewed as symbols of national pride rather than signs of human degradation. In this daring new study, anthropologist David M. Rosen investigates why our cultural perception of the child soldier has changed so radically over the past two centuries. Child Soldiers in the Western Imagination reveals how Western conceptions of childhood as a uniquely vulnerable and innocent state are a relatively recent invention. Furthermore, Rosen offers an illuminating history of how human rights organizations drew upon these sentiments to create the very term “child soldier,” which they presented as the embodiment of war’s human cost. Filled with shocking historical accounts and facts—and revealing the reasons why one cannot spell “infantry” without “infant”—Child Soldiers in the Western Imagination seeks to shake us out of our pervasive historical amnesia. It challenges us to stop looking at child soldiers through a biased set of idealized assumptions about childhood, so that we can better address the realities of adolescents and pre-adolescents in combat. Presenting informative facts while examining fictional representations of the child soldier in popular culture, this book is both eye-opening and thought-provoking.
Author: Chris Abani
Publisher: Akashic Books
ISBN: 1933354313
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 171
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Book Description
My Luck, a West African boy solider who has not spoken for three years, fights in a senseless war and embarks on a terrifying yet beautiful journey to find his lost platoon.
Author: Myriam S. Denov
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521872243
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 247
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Book Description
Traces the experiences of child soldiers in Sierra Leone during and after war and examines the implications of their participation.
Author: Christopher E. W. Ouma
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030362566
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 202
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Book Description
This book examines the representation of figures, memories and images of childhood in selected contemporary diasporic African fiction by Adichie, Abani, Wainaina and Oyeyemi. The book argues that childhood is a key framework for thinking about contemporary African and African Diasporic identities. It argues that through the privileging of childhood memory, alternative conceptions of time emerge in this literature, and which allow African writers to re-imagine what family, ethnicity, nation means within the new spaces of diaspora that a majority of them occupy. The book therefore looks at the connections between childhood, space, time and memory, childhood gender and sexuality, childhoods in contexts of war, as well as migrant childhoods. These dimensions of childhood particularly relate to the return of the memory of Biafra, the figures of child soldiers, memories of growing up in Cold War Africa, queer boyhoods/sonhood as well as experiences of migration within Africa, North America and Europe.
Author: De-Valera NYM Botchway
Publisher: Vernon Press
ISBN: 1622735870
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 278
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Book Description
What does it mean to be a child in Africa? In the detached Western media, narratives of penury, wickedness and death have dominated portrayals of African childhood. The hegemonic lens of the West has failed to take into account the intricacies of not only what it means to be an African child in local and culturally specific contexts, but also African childhood in general. Challenging colonial discourses, this edited volume guides the reader through different comprehensions and perspectives of childhood in Africa. Using a blend of theory, empiricism and history, the contributors to this volume offer studies from a range of fields including African literature, Afro-centric psychology and sociology. Importantly, in its eclectic geographical coverage of Africa, this book unashamedly presents the good, the bad and the ugly of African childhood. The resilience, creativity, pains and triumphs of African childhood are skilfully woven together to present the myriad of lived experiences and aspirations of children from across Africa. As an important contribution to African childhood studies, this book has the potential to be used by policymakers to shape, sustain or change socio-cultural, economic and education systems that accommodate African childhood dynamics and experiences at different levels.
