Reading Emmanuel Jal’s War Child as spiritual autobiography
In: Nordic Journal of African Studies, Jg. 28 (2019-12-01), Heft 4
Online
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Zugriff:
Emmanuel Jal’s War Child: A Boy Soldier’s Story picks up on the tail end of the politicisation of Sudan’s North/South ideological divisions. Its historical setting is the Second Sudanese Civil War, during which the southern part of Sudan fights to secede from the Khartoum-led government. In this paper, I focus my reading not on the reasons for the outbreak of the war, but on the ways in which Jal’s narrative is retrospectively predicated on the conversio narrative trope. I anchor my argument on what I term the text’s imagination of the transformation of all Sudanese people from a faulty ‘before’ self to an enlightened ‘after’ self, following Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson. I am particularly interested in how Jal inflects religion and spirituality in the text and how his own self-identity lends itself to what I term the text’s conversion narrative leitmotif. I also aim to show the sense in which Jal uses his change from the indoctrinated ‘bad’ child to someone who turns to God and uses religious hip hop music as a mode of preaching the message of love, peace and unity to his compatriots.
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Reading Emmanuel Jal’s War Child as spiritual autobiography
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Autor/in / Beteiligte Person: | Nick Mdika Tembo |
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Zeitschrift: | Nordic Journal of African Studies, Jg. 28 (2019-12-01), Heft 4 |
Veröffentlichung: | Nordic Africa Research Network, 2019 |
Medientyp: | academicJournal |
ISSN: | 1459-9465 (print) |
DOI: | 10.53228/njas.v28i4.452 |
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