Abstract
This chapter sets out to create a background and context from which childhood emerges as a dominant constitution of contemporary African literature. The chapter then provides a literary history of childhood in the imagination of modern African literature, after which it maps out the critical field of African childhood literary studies. Subsequently the chapter argues that the preponderance of figures, images and memories of childhood amongst contemporary diasporic African writers presents a compelling paradigm for reading contemporary African diasporic identities. Childhood identity is therefore presented as a framework alongside race, class, gender and sexuality within the corresponding contexts of family, ethnic community, nation and diaspora.
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Notes
- 1.
Walter Benjamin’s conception of this time as particularly curated by events, festivals and memorials that make connections across national time is particularly instructive.
- 2.
Waberi, “Les enfants de la postcolonie”, 8.
- 3.
Cunningham, Children and Childhood, 1.
- 4.
Brenda Cooper already does this in A New Generation of African Writers: Migration, Material Culture & Language.
- 5.
Wainaina, One Day I Will Write About This Place, 105; Atta, Everything Good Will Come, 77.
- 6.
Edwards, “The Uses of Diaspora”, 45–73. See also Michelle Wright’s The Physics of Blackness.
- 7.
Gilroy, Paul, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. I am inspired most recently by Tsitsi Ella Jaji’s apt formulation for the uses of diaspora in her book Africa in Stereo. Jaji sees the logic of diaspora as a “practice(s)” (reading off Edwards), reformulated in the contemporary moment of “renewable” Pan-Africanism as a process. Jaji’s formulation captures the broader spirit of my uses of diaspora in this book. Jaji says diaspora is “a process that generates raced subjects keenly aware of both the possibilities and the limits of solidarity”.
- 8.
In some ways, Aminatta Forna’s Ancestor Stones (2006) and The Memory of Love (2010) also speak to this recent literary history.
- 9.
Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory; McGlothlin, Second Generation Holocaust Literature.
- 10.
Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory.
- 11.
An outlier, Biyi Bandele-Thomas’s Burma Boy (2007) deepens this historical archive of “postmemory”, by its portrayal of African child soldiers employed during the Second World War.
- 12.
See, for instance, Neville Hoad’s African Intimacies, Brenna Munro’s South Africa and the Dream of Love to come and more specifically Taiwo Adetunji Osinubi and Neville Hoad’s special issue in Research in African Literatures on “Queer Valences in African Literature”.
- 13.
It is a growing list that includes: Sefi Atta, Helon Habila, Akin Adesokan, Chika Unigwe, Brian Chikwava, Noviolet Bulawayo, Jude Dibia, Yewande Omotoso, Segun Afolabi, Unoma Azuah, Uzodinma Iweala, Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani, Moses Isegawa, Doreen Baingana, J Nozipho Maraire, Taiye Selasi, Sade Adeniran, Dinaw Mengistu and Yaa Gyasi, amongst many others.
- 14.
Atta says, “Novels give me space to fail”, in an interview with Ike Anya titled “Sefi Atta: Something Good Comes to Nigerian Literature” (www.sefiatta.com/news.html. Accessed 20 January 2008).
- 15.
Bakhtin, ibid., 3, 22.
- 16.
Adichie’s interview “My Book Should Provoke a Conversation”—http://www.nigeriavillagesquare.com/bookshelf/book-reviews/my-book-should-provoke-a-conversation-chimamanda-ngozi.html. Accessed 30 January 2008.
- 17.
In the author’s note at the end of Half of a Yellow Sun Adichie points to the influence of early works on Biafra on her creation of characters and what she calls “the mood of middle-class Biafra”. She also gives a long list of books on Biafra that informed her research.
- 18.
Ali, “Literature and Market Realism”, 140–145; Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic, and Brouillette, Postcolonial Writers, are examples of how literary value is assigned through the global operations of capital in publishing and constructing reading publics. See also Madhu Krishnan’s “Global African Literature”, 130–163, as well as Akin Adesokan’s “New African Writing and the question of audience”, 1–20. See Adichie’s TED talk “The Danger of a Single Story”: https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story?language=en
- 19.
Mostly Bordieu’s The Field; Cassanova’s Republic and English’s Economy.
- 20.
See Madhu Krishnan Contemporary African Literature in English.
- 21.
Adichie remarks in an interview on January 25 in France titled “Night of Ideas” about “postcolonial theory” as a “made-up” for professors who wanted to get jobs. See also Grace Musila, “‘Chimamanda Adichie’ Daughter of Postcolonial Theory” and Shailja Patel’s tweets on this controversial remarks.
- 22.
See interview with Chiagozie Nwonu: https://thisisafrica.me/lifestyle/must-stop-giving-legitimacy-caine-prize-binyavanga/ (9 September 2014).
- 23.
The subject of black periodicals and the booming period of black internationalism has been the subject of Edwards’s The Practice of Diaspora, as well as Jaji’s Africa in Stereo.
- 24.
She is author of six novels, which include The Icarus Girl (2005), The Opposite House (2007), White Is for Witching (2009), Mr Fox (2011), Boy, Snow, Bird (2014) and Ginger Bread (2019).
- 25.
Garuba, “Animist Materialism”.
- 26.
Mudimbe’s The Invention of Africa, The Idea of Africa and On African Faultlines continue to grapple with the aggregative weight of the colonial history of epistemic violence to the continent.
- 27.
Okolie “Childhood in African Literature”, 29.
- 28.
Okolie, ibid., 30.
- 29.
Abanime “Childhood à la Camara Laye and Childhood à la Mongo Beti” 82–90. See also King, The Writings of Camara Laye.
- 30.
Ten Kortenaar’s “Oedipus, Ogbanje and the Sons of independence”, 187.
- 31.
Marete “Absence of Conflict in Maturation in The African Child”, 91–101.
- 32.
Heath, “Childhood Times”, 20.
- 33.
Biyidi, “L’Efant Noir”, 16, and Desai “The Theme of Childhood in Commonwealth Fiction”, 45.
- 34.
See Fredric Jameson’s often-cited article “Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism”, 65–88.
- 35.
I use this phrase from Michelle Wright (Becoming Black, 8) to emphasize the paradoxical nature of Ikemefuna as already “internally diasporic” in Okonkwo’s household.
- 36.
Coe, When the Grass Was Taller, 17.
- 37.
The essays in Ikonne et al.’s Childhood in African Literature, as well as Obioma Nnaemeka’s 1997 foundational text The Politics of (M)othering.
- 38.
This is evident also in Schipper’s argument in “Mother Africa on a Pedestal”, 35–54; Florence Strattons’s African Literature and the Politics of Gender as well as Anne McClintock’s examination of gender in colonial contexts in her book Imperial Leather.
- 39.
See Oakley, “Women and Children First and Last: Parallels and Differences between Children’s and Women’s Studies”, 13–32.
- 40.
See Eidse and Sichel, Unrooted Childhoods: Memoirs of Growing up Global, or Abbott, Boyhood: Growing up Male.
- 41.
See, for instance, the essays in Ikonne, C., Oko, E., and Onwudinjo, P., Children and Literature in Africa.
- 42.
See Eldred Jones, “Childhood Before and After Birth”, 1–8.
- 43.
Hawley, “Ben Okri’s Spirit-Child: Abiku Migration and Postmodernity”, 38–48.
- 44.
Cooper, Generation, ibid.
- 45.
See Adesanmi and Duntons’s editions of English in Africa and Research in African Literatures.
- 46.
Adesanmi, P., and Dunton, C. “Nigeria’s Third Generation Writing: Historiography and Preliminary Theoretical Considerations”, 15.
- 47.
Hewett, “Coming of Age: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and the Voice of the Third Generation”, 73–97; Chielozona, “Cosmopolitan Solidarity”, 99–112.
- 48.
Coe, ibid., 17.
- 49.
In this edition, Madeleine Hron’s article “Ora na-azu nwa”, 27–48, can be singled out as directly dealing with the notion of “transcultural” childhoods which occupy liminal cultural spaces that allow them to be creative and to enact what Hron calls “possibility and most importantly resistance”.
- 50.
Muponde, “Childhood, History and Resistance”, PhD diss., University of the Witwatersrand.
- 51.
Muponde, ibid., 92.
- 52.
Priebe, ibid., 41.
- 53.
Priebe, ibid., 50–51.
- 54.
Priebe., op. cit., 50.
- 55.
See, for instance, Akin Adesokan “New African Writing”, op. cit.
- 56.
Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism, 180.
- 57.
See Appiah, In My Father’s House; Hulme et al., Colonial Discourse; Williams and Chrisman, Colonial Discourse; Chambers and Curtis, The Postcolonial Question; Quayson, Strategic Transformations; Lazarus, The Postcolonial Unconscious.
- 58.
Ato Quayson’s Postcolonialism: Theory, Practice or Process? makes this argument.
- 59.
Moore-Gilbert, 12. Gilbert also distinguishes between “postcolonial theory” and “postcolonial criticism”.
- 60.
Young, Postcolonialism.
- 61.
Lazarus, Postcolonial, 36.
- 62.
Appiah, In My Father’s House, 235.
- 63.
Bailkin, The Afterlife of Empire.
- 64.
See, for instance, David Scott’s reading of C.L.R. James’s two prefaces of the 1938 and 1963 editions of The Black Jacobins in Conscripts.
- 65.
An instructive theorization of the concept of diaspora as distinct from such concepts as “transnational” and “multinational” is found in Jana Evans Braziel and Anita Mannur (“Nation, Migration, Globalization”, 8), in which they posit that as distinct from the other concepts, diaspora is more anthropocentric, while transnational includes cultural artefacts, NGOs, capital and other non-anthropocentric elements. This is similar to Appadurai’s (Modernity) idea of the “ethnoscape” as an anthropocentric dimension of the different scapes of global cultural flows (technoscapes, financescapes, mediascapes, ideoscapes), which, he argues, are in a disjunctural relationship with each other.
- 66.
In an interview, for example, Oyeyemi, one of the writers studied here, admits the similarities between the girl Jessamy Harrison in her text The Icarus Girl and herself. She says, “The Icarus Girl shows a lot more of me than I initially thought it did. Jessamy is almost scary than me”. Oyeyemi actually attempted suicide by taking an overdose of sleeping pills and painkillers after getting into trouble with two other girls in school. Source: www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/3636069/A-writers-life-Helen-Oyeyemi.html
- 67.
Quayson, ibid., 132–155.
- 68.
de Certeau, The Practice.
- 69.
Gikandi, Reading Chinua Achebe.
- 70.
See Garuba, ibid.
- 71.
Cooper, Seeing with a Third Eye, 29.
- 72.
Gaylard, African Postmodernity, 3.
- 73.
Appiah, ibid.
- 74.
In the blurb of Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun there is a comment by Achebe which reads, “We do not usually associate wisdom with beginners, but here is a new writer endowed with the gift of ancient storytellers […] Adichie came almost fully made”.
- 75.
See endnote 72.
- 76.
Davis refers to them as “fictional fathers”, whose manifestation in the text is a re-finding of the absent fathers.
- 77.
Zwinger, Daughters, Fathers and the Novel.
- 78.
Zwinger, ibid., 8.
- 79.
Paula Marantz Cohen’s The Daughter’s Dilemma describes the novel as having become domestic by virtue of it having increasingly adopted an intricate, intensely psychological form in recent times. Cohen posits that novels, like families, have genealogies and are part of culturally established canons and traditions.
- 80.
Frosh’s corpus of works, including Identity Crisis, Sexual Difference and The Politics of Psychoanalysis, provides useful frameworks for psycho-political analysis of political identity in relation to gender.
- 81.
Butler, Gender Trouble, xxxi.
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Ouma, C.E.W. (2020). Introduction: Constructing Childhood as a Set of Ideas. In: Childhood in Contemporary Diasporic African Literature. African Histories and Modernities. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36256-0_1
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