Cirrus

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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'Using Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Doris Pilkington/ Nuri Garimara’s Rabbit Proof Fence, and Uwem Akpan’s Fattening for Gabon, this paper charts the resistant resilience of three young protagonists who negotiate recurring forms of neo/colonial violence in disparate contexts. Each navigates brutal conditions through intuitive, rebellious, transformative acts that disrupt dominant temporal and spatial scales to reframe subaltern histories. Distinct but related struggles for wider horizons of possibility reveal cumulative ruptures in intergenerational care across chronic, if scattered, hegemonies. All call into question assumptions informing mainstream coming-ofage novels through narrow but instructive escapes from over-determined sites of gendered, sexualized and racialized subordination.' (Publication abstract)

Notes

Epigraph :
If you want to know the future of a society, look at the eyes of the children.
If you want to maim the future of any society, you simply maim the children.
–Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, 1993 (76)
They had to learn that this was part of their history too.
All this happened at the time that they were growing up and their parents were raising them and sending them to school.
While this was happening to us, they were happily playing in their backyards.
They weren’t taught in schools about this other side of . . . the dark history, if you like.
–Doris Pilkington/Nugi Garimara, interviewed by Anne Brewster, 2007