Childhood In Contemporary Diasporic African Literature

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.

"African authors have consistently returned to childhood to find their personal as well as their racial roots. Far from being merely nostalgic yearnings for a lost paradise, many of the treatments of childhood as shown in articles in this issue have exposed a grim reality of cruelty, harshness, parental (particularly paternal) egocentrism and extraordinary bruisings of the vulnerable child psyche. Camara Laye may have portrayed a paradise state but Yvonne Vera has treated one of the cruelest features of childhood anywhere. African authors generally have been sternly responsible in their portrayal of childhood." -- Publisher's description

Representing Africa in Children’s Literature explores how African and Western authors portray youth in contemporary African societies, critically examining the dominant images of Africa and Africans in books published between 1960 and 2005. The book focuses on contemporary children’s and young adult literature set in Africa, examining issues regarding colonialism, the politics of representation, and the challenges posed to both "insiders" and "outsiders" writing about Africa for children.

The Routledge Handbook of the New African Diasporic Literature introduces world literature readers to the transnational, multivocal writings of immigrant African authors. Covering works produced in Europe, North America, and elsewhere in the world, this book investigates three major aesthetic paradigms in African diasporic literature: the Sankofan wave (late 1960s–early 1990s); the Janusian wave (1990s–2020s); and the Offshoots of the New Arrivants (those born and growing up outside Africa). Written by well-established and emerging scholars of African and diasporic literatures from across the world, the chapters in the book cover the works of well-known and not-so-well-known Anglophone, Francophone, and Lusophone writers from different theoretical positionalities and critical approaches, pointing out the unique innovative artistic qualities of this major subgenre of African literature. The focus on the “diasporic consciousness” of the writers and their works sets this handbook apart from others that solely emphasize migration, which is more of a process than the community of settled African people involved in the dynamic acts of living reflected in diasporic writings. This book will appeal to researchers and students from across the fields of Literature, Diaspora Studies, African Studies, Migration Studies, and Postcolonial Studies.

This book investigates the many ways in which contemporary African fiction has reflected on themes of responsibility and complicity during the postcolonial period. Covering the authors Ayi Kwei Armah, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Nuruddin Farah, Michiel Heyns, and J. M. Coetzee, the book places each writer’s novels in their cultural and literary context in order to investigate similarities and differences between fictional approaches to individual complicity in politically unstable situations. In doing so, the study focuses on these texts’ representations of discomforting experiences of being implicated in harm done to others in order to show that it is precisely during times of political crisis that questions of moral responsibility and implicatedness in compromised conduct become more pronounced. The study also challenges longstanding western amnesia concerning responsibility for historical and present-day violence in African countries and juxtaposes this denial of responsibility with the western literary readership’s consumption of narratives of African “suffering.” The study instead proposes new reading habits based on an awareness of readerly complicity and responsibility. Drawing insights from across political philosophy and literary theory, this book will be of interest to researchers of African literature, postcolonial studies, and peace and conflict studies.

This textbook introduces readers to the academic scholarship on the history of childhood and youth in sub-Saharan Africa, with a particular focus on the colonial and postcolonial eras. In a series of seven chapters, it addresses key themes in the historical scholarship, arguing that age serves as a useful category for historical analysis in African history. Just as race, class, and gender can be used to understand how African societies have been structured over time, so too age is a powerful tool for thinking about how power, youth, and seniority intersect and change over time. This is, then, a work of synthesis rather than of new research based on primary sources. This book will therefore introduce mainstream scholars of the history of childhood and youth to the literature on Africa, and scholars of youth in Africa to debates within the wider field of the history of children and youth.

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.

Representing Africa in Children’s Literature explores how African and Western authors portray youth in contemporary African societies, critically examining the dominant images of Africa and Africans in books published between 1960 and 2005. The book focuses on contemporary children’s and young adult literature set in Africa, examining issues regarding colonialism, the politics of representation, and the challenges posed to both "insiders" and "outsiders" writing about Africa for children.