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

literary and legal representations of child soldiers. The call to mourning in the titles also implies a complicated relationship between those failures or losses and global cultural production, as that which is mourned inevitably returns through the production and consumption of the stories themselves.¹ In this chapter, I look at the relationship between ostensibly sovereign subjects and ghosts in Uzodinma Iweala's Beasts of No Nation and Chris Abani's Song for Night to examine what cannot be put easily to rest in these novels about child soldiers. The forms of imaginative compensation the texts offer illuminate the oftentimes-shadowy space between mourning and haunting. My approach stems from Joseph Slaughter's insight that “a human rights abuse is characterized as an infringement on the modern subject's ability to narrate her story” (“Question of Narration” 413). The child soldier's compromised authority (Can she speak for herself? Does he seek acknowledgment, retribution, forgiveness, aid?), combined with his or her symbolic invocation of political failure, focuses attention on narration as a site of contestation with legal and literary implications. More specifically, Iweala and Abani's recent depictions of child soldiers raise questions about how we understand and categorize these stories. Given the authors' transnational identifications and the way child soldiers problematize categories of subject and nation, two staples of postcolonial theory, this paper examines the intersection of human rights and literature as a means of expanding our understanding of “postcoloniality.” Graham Huggan defines postcoloniality as “a value-regulating mechanism within the global late-capitalist system of commodity exchange,” which may work counter to postcolonialism's anti-colonial impetuses, and I invoke it here in relation to both law and literature (6). Beasts of No Nation and Song for Night, particularly in contrast with one another, ask the reader to negotiate that discomfiting pull between postcolonialism and postcoloniality in global fiction and international humanitarian and human rights law.

Although the participation of children in armed conflict is not new historically,² it has garnered unusual attention in recent years as evidenced in new legal mechanisms, legal criticism, humanitarian efforts, social sciences reports, and literary and filmic productions. The ideological