Interrogating conceptions of childhood in contemporary African fiction

Abstract

This study concerns the way children in contemporary African fiction may be seen to be active in the construction of their own lives. Using a selection of four novels (two about girls, two about boys, two from South Africa, two from outside South Africa), I seek to demonstrate how they reveal the large degree of agency that children possess. While these writers unfold, on the one hand, the particularity of children's experience, on the other, they also emphasize ways in which children are inevitably shaped by their contexts, whether historical or immediate. Constraints, however, may in certain cases actually prove to be empowering. Central also to my concern is to reveal how these novelists avoid the stereotype of childhood innocence by representing the presence of good, misguided, confused and even evil impulses in their protagonists.

Keywords:

• Representation
• interrogation
• contemporary African fiction
• conceptions
• childhood
• self-construction
• agency
• anti-sacralization