Growing Up in the Global South: Children, Agency and World-Making in Contemporary Literature

This CFP is open for contributions that look at modern and contemporary literary representations of children and young adults across the various areas of the Global South. Engaging with the surge of an interdisciplinary interest in the area of Childhood Studies, this panel seeks to foster a discussion about the role of minors as active, aware and effective participants of the complex sociohistorical contexts that frame their coming-of-age process. The proposed focus of the panel is the concept of “agency,” which can be observed in its multiple implications: social, historical, ethical, political, economic. Going against the grain of traditional depictions of minors –commonly depicted as allegories of nation states, secondary characters at the margins of history, passive witnesses of their sociohistorical conditions, and signifiers of futurity– we invite papers that bring to the fore the capacity of minors to take an active role in the decision-making process of their lives, observe themselves as agents within the context of their immediate communities, and challenge practices of authority. This becomes an especially important issue in the countries of the Global South, where the life of children and minors are marked by multiple and often superimposed conditions of marginality and precarity. In this sense, our panel gives continuity to recent academic trends that reframe the protagonism of children in contemporary societies and rehabilitate their interventions in the politics of every-day life, their capacity of reshaping of historical memories and official narratives, their questioning of societal and codes of conduct, their renegotiation of identities and processes of ethical and affective education, as well as their active role in migratory processes. Submissions dealing with literatures from Central, South and Southeast Asia; Africa, and Latin America, are especially encouraged.