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

Besides the difficult logistics of publishing, it is also clear that the low rates of literacy create pitfalls for those books that do appear—both at the level of review as noted above and also at the audience level. Despite these challenges, young African writers keep writing, and contemporary scholars, students, and readers in general anticipate a bright future with an ever-expanding collection of new African texts.

This collection of essays is divided into three thematic parts—“Behind My Eye I Am Seeing”: Perspectives of Young Narrators, “Exile Is My Geographical Suicide”: Globalization and Transculturation, and “Lance in Hand Against a False Tongue”: Issues of Language, Rhetoric, and Culture. In her recent article “Ora na-azu nwa: The Figure of the Child in Third-Generation Nigerian Novels,” Madelaine Hron discusses the profusion of Nigerian novels that deal with children and childhood. She writes: “Particularly striking in the recent wave of Nigerian fiction is the figure of the child or the youth…” (27). Hron continues by noting that “the figure of youth is a particularly apt vehicle for the third-generation of Nigerian authors—themselves children of ‘the children of the postcolony’ (Waberi 8)” (28). Pointing out that children have traditionally been included in African literature, she mentions as examples Camara Laye's L'enfant noir, Ferdinand Oyono's Une vie de boy, and Ngugi's Weep Not, Child published between the early 1950s and early 1960s while concluding that “[i]n third-generation Nigerian texts in particular, it becomes apparent that the child's quest for a sociocultural identity is inextricably linked to issues arising from postcolonialism and globalization, often manifested in the context of repression, violence or exploitation” (Hron 28–29). It is these dire circumstances that are examined explicitly in Part I. Alexandra Schultheis's chapter explores the plight of child soldiers in Uzodinma Iweala's Beasts of No Nation (2005) while probing the larger notions of representation and