Seminar
Murderers, rapists, cannibals - and Lambs. Child Soldiers in Literature and Cinema

Catarina Martins (NECC/CES)

April 27th, 2010, 17:00, CES Seminar Room, 2nd Floor, Coimbra

Within the Comparative Cultural Studies Research Group

Free Entrance

 
Presentation

The present seminar seeks to analyze the representation of child-soldiers of African contexts in literary and cinematographic works, be them fictional or documental, from North and South. In fact, the confrontation of these representations is raised by the abyssal difference (following Boaventura de Sousa Santos), which demands a reading in the framework of post-colonial theory, so to deconstruct, on the one hand, the supposed universality of a hegemonic concept of “child” or “childhood”, revealing it as a regulative discourse creator of diverse subalternities, and , on the other hand, its articulation with a discourse on Africa that intends to legitimize practices of neo-colonial nature in different fields. At the heart of this problematization is the paradox contained in the very term "child soldiers" between innocence (while essence of child-being) and the responsibility, explored through an active and reactive perspective, on the part of, respectively, authors and directors from the North and South.

> Print this page