Troubling Humanitarian Consumption
Reframing Relationality in African Child Soldier Narratives
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 9250482 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Mackey Mackey (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2013 |
| Volume | 44 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 99 |
| Publication date | 2013-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Research in African Literatures (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0034-5210 • E-ISSN: 1527-2044 |
| Publisher | Indiana University Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.2979/reseafrilite.44.4.99 |
| OpenAlex | W2048738399 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 16 |
| References cited | 17 |
Given the proliferation of representations of child soldiers in contemporary socio-political, legal, and cultural discourse, I explore 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), Senait Mehari's Heart of Fire (2006), Emmanuel Jal's Warchild (2009), Uzodinma Iweala's Beasts of No Nation (2005), Chris Abani's Song for Night (2007), and Delia Jarrett-McCauley's Moses, Citizen, and Me (2005). 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? I suggest 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
Art · Cognitive reframing · Consumption (sociology) · Environmental ethics · Literature · Narrative · Political science · Social science · Sociology · Children's Rights and Participation · Gender Studies · History · Migration, Refugees, and Integration · Philosophy · Psychology · Social Psychology · South African History and Culture
Annual Bibliography of Works about Life Writing, 2012-2013
Iweala, Uzodinma
Reversing perverted development
Child Soldier Narratives and Their War Names
Family, country, and conditional humanity
Child Soldier Narratives and the Underrepresentation of Females in Fighting Forces
The Kenyan Consumer-Reader
Decolonizing moral injury studies and treatment approaches
Ethical Dialogues
Anxious Reading
Anxious Reading
This is my story”
Trauma, Violence, and Memory in African Child Soldier Memoirs
Precarity, Protectedness and Power in Emmanuel Jal's WARchild
Narrative, time, and the archive in an African Second World War memoir
The relative innocence of child soldiers
Reading autobiography
The Limits of Autobiography
Giving an Account of Oneself
Law and disorder in the postcolony
Oprah's Paton, or south Africa and the Globalization of Suffering
African Child Soldiers and Humanitarian Consumption
Mother, Child, Race, Nation
Shakespeare's Julius Caesar in Sierra Leone
Ora na-azu nwa
Transnational Adoption and Queer Diasporas
Of Mimicry and Membership
Necropolitics
The Evidence of Experience
| Unique citing works | 16 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1,23 |
| Citation span | 2013 - 2026 (14) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 15 |