This book examines the figures, images and memories of childhood in a number of texts as a discourse for the analysis of cultural, socio-economic and political identities of the continent and its new and emerging Diasporas. Going back to the memories of childhood allows us to re-experience temporalities differently. This book argues that the reconstruction of temporalities through highlighting the consciousness of childhood is informed by two major things: Firstly, the writers examined - including Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Chris Abani, Hellen Oyeyemi, and Binyavanga Wainaina - privilege the narrative of childhood because they are products of this contemporary moment – of conflagration and therefore of migration, displacement, even exile. This is on account of growing up and experiencing this turmoil as children and migrating across the Atlantic to live their adult lives elsewhere. In other words they write with a diasporic consciousness that invokes an engagement with a “homeland” of childhood. Secondly is the inherent idea of place. For these writers, the place of childhood is a ‘space’ for particular modes of affect and self-fashioning that informs specific imagination(s). The argument here then, is that childhood as represented by the writers in the proposed book informs contemporary African diasporic identities which have, as Ania Loomba argues “come to represent much of the experience of postcoloniality”.weiterlesen