Childhood in Contemporary Diasporic African Literature

Abstract

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.”. Using Bakhtin’s idea of the chronotope, this chapter examines the aesthetico-political nature of space and place, and their entanglements with particular temporalities outlined in the previous chapter. The chapter reads Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus and Half of a Yellow Sun as narratives which construct particular spaces as chronotopes of return—places which are read as conjunctures of nostalgia, familial genealogy and cultural memory within the context of the Biafran War. In this manner, the Biafran War takes the shape of what Holocaust scholar Marianne Hirsch calls “postmemory”. The chapter reads Adichie’s account of the Biafran War as part of a re-emergent corpus of writing that speaks to the notion of generational and cultural memory. However, these genealogies of memories recuperate a political economy for Adichie’s generation, largely through the multidirectional logic of their production, circulation and distribution. So the chapter frames these chronotopes of postmemory through Michael Rothberg’s important concept of “multidirectional memory”—one that takes on board the cultural and diasporic mobilities of these memories, which continue to challenge the proscriptive logic of the nation-state.