Social justice in the courtroom: youth culture and multiple narrative voices in Eustace Palmer’s A Hanging Is Announced

Abstract

African writers who have been concerned with governmental authority have sought to uncover the sources of injustice in the larger societal context, to redefine criminality beyond the focus on individual culpability. Using multiple narrative voices and the courtroom as literary space, Eustace Palmer’s A Hanging Is Announced exemplifies the search for social justice through representations of youth culture. Multiple narrative voices can be understood through musical analogies, such as counterpoint, developed in such theoretical ideas as those of Edward Said. The stories of the five varied narrative voices in A Hanging Is Announced are “intertwined” and are of a contrapuntal or polyphonic nature, akin as well to patterns of jazz improvisation. Palmer reveals through retrospection and a contrapuntal grounding the relationship between the larger Sierra Leonean pre-civil war social order and the justice system influenced by powerful elites. The courtroom scenario reflecting the “whodunit” motif, often portrayed in Western popular culture, is given symbolic rendering. Furthermore, the novel explores complex familial relationships and child labor as well as sexual exploitation of youth who become victims of foreign tourism.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

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Notes on contributors

Joseph McLaren

Joseph McLaren is Professor Emeritus of English, Hofstra University, where he taught African American and African literature. His publications include Langston Hughes: Folk Dramatist in the Protest Tradition, 1921–1943 (1997) and co-edited works Pan-Africanism Updated (1999) and African Visions (2000). He co-authored I Walked with Giants (2010), jazz saxophonist Jimmy Heath's autobiography. Professor McLaren also published such essays as “Malcolm-esque: A Black Arts Literary Genre” in Malcolm X’s Michigan Worldview: An Exemplar for Contemporary Black Studies (2015); “Slavery in Toni Morrison’s Beloved” in Critical Insights: Beloved (2015); “Rethinking the African Link: Nationalism, Freedom, and Culture in Jazz Signifiers” in Transnational Trills in the Africana World (2019); and “Zora Neale Hurston: Retrieving Folk Memory in Mules and Men” in The Palgrave Handbook of African Oral Traditions and Folklore (2021).