Identity and Childhood

Abstract

The book concludes by underlining the point that the figures, images and memories of childhood present frameworks and discursive formations for a contemporary African and African diasporic identity. Negotiating itself besides and below the postcolonial, through a diasporic aesthetic, childhood seems to dominate the narrative landscape of the twenty-first century. As a set of ideas, in the way the book examines it, it therefore figures the new zeitgeist as charting a path to new diasporic identities across the Atlantic. In important ways, the book concludes that childhood, as a set of ideas, operates alongside contemporary figurations of race, gender, sexuality and class while laterally re-defining these as dominant categories across several levels of macro-identity formation (familial, ethnic, national and continental).