African Child Soldiers in Literature and Film. Representation, Discourse, Aesthetics

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Susanne Gehrmann
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies ; African, American and Oceania Studies
• Term: from 2015 to 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 273922253

After 2000, the presence of African child soldiers in media and artistic discourse in the global North as well as in African and Afro-diasporic cultural productions is extremely pervasive. The project aims at a thorough critical discussion of representations of African Child soldiers in literature and film. It analyzes how narrative and audiovisual texts, which focus on the symbolic figure of the child soldier, go beyond historical and sociological explanations of the phenomenon and how they construct their specific aesthetics. The project interrogates the value of the ethical impact and the political contribution of such cultural productions as well as it examines the reproduction of stereotypes about the African continent, which may be perpetuated through the focalisation of unspeakable violence on and by the puerile figure of a disaster victim. According to the approach of this project, representation is not to be understood as a sheer reproductive sign, which simply mirrors social reality. Rather, it is argued that representation is a form of figuration that includes the interpretation of reality and that contributes to the discursive construction of imaginations of "Africa", childhood and war. Therefore, the project aims at valorising those literary and cinematographic narratives that function as a space for human negotiation of violence as well as of fundamental social concepts such as the nation and/or gender, considering that literature and film can contribute to the understanding of the history of war and to the healing of individual and collective trauma. The project's analysis comprises international as well as local forms of cultural discourse and will cross-examine both. Fieldwork has been carried out in West Africa (Nigeria) and in Central Africa (Congo and the Democratic Republic of Congo). As an overarching method, postcolonial Foucauldian discourse analysis will be employed while a literary-sociological contextualisation and textual close readings with narratology, rhetoric, semiotic, intertextual and intermedial critical frameworks will refine the study. The conduction of expert interviews will further contribute to a better conceptualization of the discursive field. On the one hand, the project will unmask the complexity of fictional and testimonial representations and at the same time look at the specific aesthetics deployed by literary and cinematographic contributions. On the other hand, the pitfalls of the renewed representation of Africa as continent of atrocious violence through the ubiquitous figure of the child soldier will be debunked. Due to the sensitivity and complexity of the subject, ambivalences and interferences of both tendencies are however inevitable. These tensions must be critically evaluated and perceived as part of the discursive ensemble.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Democratic Republic of the Congo, Nigeria, Republic of the Congo
• Cooperation Partners: Professor Dr. Babatunde Ayeleru, Ph.D.; Professor Dr. Mukala Kadima-Nzuji; Professor Dr. Aderemi Raji-Oyelade, Ph.D.; Professor Dr. Lye Yoka