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Periodical article Periodical article Leiden University catalogue Leiden University catalogue WorldCat catalogue WorldCat
Title:Troubling humanitarian consumption: reframing relationality in African child soldier narratives
Author:Mackey, Allison
Year:2013
Periodical:Research in African Literatures (ISSN 0034-5210)
Volume:44
Issue:4
Pages:99-122
Language:English
Geographic term:Africa
Subjects:novels
autobiography
child soldiers
About persons:Ishmael Beah (1980-)ISNI
Senait Ghebrehiwet Mehari (1976-)ISNI
Emmanuel Jal (1980-)ISNI
Uzodinma Iweala (1982-)ISNI
Chris Abani (1966-)ISNI
Delia Jarrett-Macauley (1958-)ISNI
External link:http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/research_in_african_literatures/v044/44.4.mackey.pdf
Abstract:Given the proliferation of representations of child soldiers in contemporary socio-political, legal, and cultural discourse, the author explores how the figure of the African child soldier is being mobilized and challenged in the twenty-first century by considering what imaginative and unsettling cultural and political work is being performed in a selection of autobiographical and fictional narratives: Ishmael Beah's 'A Long Way Gone' (2007, Sierra Leone), Senait Mehari's 'Heart of Fire' (2006, Eritrea), Emmanuel Jal's 'Warchild' (2009, South Sudan), Uzodinma Iweala's 'Beasts of No Nation' (2005, Nigeria), Chris Abani's 'Song for Night' (2007, Nigeria), and Delia Jarrett-McCauley's 'Moses, Citizen, and Me' (2005, Sierra Leone). How are we to hear the voice of the child soldier, as a quintessential figure of the voiceless, when it asserts itself within an imagined transnational community of writers/readers of literature? The author suggests that, even though they participate in an ethically and market-based economy of humanitarian consumption, the relational and indirect narrative strategies in these texts trouble the already troubled relationship between the spaces where child soldiers are being used and those where narratives about them are being consumed. Although there are no guarantees as to how these texts are taken up by readers, they at least have the potential of coaxing the reader into confronting difficult questions about the limits of 'universal' human rights and into recognizing a need to radically rethink planetary relations. Bibliogr., notes, ref., sum. [Journal abstract]
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