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

human rights into an ever more universal discourse, and to ascribe ever more authority to it, gives impetus to the remapping of the cartography of jurisdictions” (Comaroff and Comaroff 33). What purports to set universal standards, as many have noted, normalizes a particular construction of the human-as-legal subject that is most legible within Western traditions. The definition of childhood as a time of innocence, play (rather than work), and cultivation of “full development of personality” reflects an investment in liberal, capitalist values dependent upon the individual's successful negotiation of separate public and private spheres.¹¹ In her excellent reading of the ideological presuppositions of the CRC, Sharon Stephens notes that the document recognizes the child as “a universal, free-standing individual child…[who is] on a particular developmental trajectory” (36). The acknowledgment of “the importance of the traditions and cultural values of each people” follows well after the reiteration of the UDHR's recognition of inherent rights, broadly liberal values, individual development, and the family “as the fundamental group of society and the natural environment for the growth and well-being of all its members” (Preamble, CRC). “The Convention argues,” Stephens summarizes, “that the child has first and foremost a right to international modernist culture…, then to identity (conceived in individual, familial, and national terms), and finally, in special cases, to minority and indigenous cultures” (39). The psychosocial approach to “recovery and social reintegration of a child victim” (Article 39, CRC), often defined and administered by international humanitarian organizations with the backing of IHL, reasserts that hierarchy of desirable cultural values and those who maintain them. Therapeutic language regarding the abstract individual only compounds the elision of structural inequities and political crises frequently articulated through marked cultural difference.¹² The language fails to consider that the individual will only be legible and functional in a social context that, given the individual's current status, has already been severely damaged.

The universalizing legal narrative of a child who “should” be nurtured in certain ways in order to achieve full subjectivity in autonomous, bounded individualism finds a literary equivalent in the genre of the bildungsroman as “the symbolic form that more than any other has portrayed