Emerging African Voices: A Study of Contemporary African Literatu ...

itself, Dipesh Chakrabarty emphasizes the need to bridge the divide between “the analytic and the affective” (“Radical Histories” 262). For me, fiction may bridge that divide. It has the potential “to move away from the monomania of the imagination that operates within the gesture that the knowing, judging, willing subject always already knows what is good for everybody, ahead of any investigation” (Chakrabarty, “Radical Histories” 275). In order to reimagine history from subaltern subject positions that do not yearn for but “[disrupt] the languages of the state, of citizenship, of wholes and totalities, [and] the legacy of Enlightenment rationalism” we must develop “analytical categories in academic discourse that do justice to the real, everyday and multiple ‘connections’ we have to what we, in becoming modern, have come to see as ‘non-rational’ ” (276, 262). Agu and My Luck challenge us to rethink development and modernity, such that child soldiers, staple figures in African fiction and contemporary armed conflict, represent something other than familial-national deviance from history. The trope of the specter, moreover, brings the non-rational to bear as that which cannot be excluded.

The continuing conversation among human rights workers, legal scholars, reporters, and cultural workers over the definition, status, and legal protections accorded child soldiers has, notwithstanding trenchant critiques, coalesced around notions of the child (as a person below age eighteen) in armed conflict as an innocent victim of adult depravity, in need of protection by the very forces that have already seemingly failed him or her. Embedded in these narratives is a “politics of age” that reflects the ideological positions and political objectives of the participants in these discussions (Rosen, “Child Soldiers” 296). The negotiated consensus in normative IHL on child soldiers, while designed to ensure the greatest possible scope of protection, elides the intertwined problems of their re-presentation, in the sense of IHL's depiction of and speaking for child soldiers, which are implicit in consensus itself (Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” 278); at the same time, some literary narratives, anthropological readings, and legal critiques draw attention to those elisions through close analysis of cultural constructions of childhood and the agency that attends it.