| Chapter 1: | Global Specters |
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as formulated in the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child, focuses on the ramifications of “[c]hildhood in this conception [as] romanticized and utopianized and at the same time peculiarly disenfranchised and disempowered” (1528). I want to extend her conclusion that childhood “as a clearly demarcated space of limited autonomy is an idealization of what it is to be human and a gloss on the relation between agency and rights” by looking more closely at child soldiers in the recent fiction by Uzodinma Iweala and Chris Abani (1534, emphasis added). If we see childhood as a “distinctive way of being human,” the distinction ostensibly rests on the child's incorporation of familial and cultural investment and the still undetermined promise of its future returns: childhood should, in its idealized form, represent what we value most and wish to protect and cultivate for the future (1527). Child soldiers complicate that moral economy by including in its calculations what Achille Mbembe calls a “logic of expenditure” in which “the giving of death has become a prime means of creating the world” (“On Politics” 299, original emphasis). The figure of the child soldier embodies contradiction: at once vulnerable and violent, victim and perpetrator, innocent and knowing, it appears to call forth the promise and failure of law and politics (both nationally and internationally) as well as to contribute to “the destruction of all social bonds—other than the bond of hostility” (Mbembe, “On Politics” 322). Those contradictions provide much of the narrative tension for child soldiers in the novels. They both raise and problematize expectations of the developmental narrative of the bildungsroman through implicating readers in forging an ethical “experience of the impossible” within the so-called “world republic of letters” (Spivak, Critique 427).
The conflicted status of child soldiers in both literary and legal narratives turns Bhabha's question“What sort of a human is a child?”—back on itself to ask how child soldiers unsettle our understandings of subjectivity and the nation-state. The elegiac titles of recent literary and filmic depictions of African child soldiers, such as Beasts of No Nation (2005), Invisible Children: Rough Cut (2003), A Long Way Gone (2007), and Song for Night (2007), seem to reflect the failure of certain idealizations of subject and nation, which are legible through interrelated