Apparitions of Planetary Consciousness in Contemporary Coming-of-Age Narratives: Reimagining Knowledge, Responsibility and Belonging

Abstract

<p>My dissertation explores contemporary coming-of-age stories that employ spectral and relational narrative strategies to address readers, demanding a re-negotiated response from them. Drawing upon and extending the observations of critics who emphasize the role of liberalism and its contradictory legacies for post-colonial <em>Bildungsroman</em>, my research highlights a radically ethical potential in unsettling reiterations of this long-standing narrative form. The narratives that I have chosen to examine—namely, U.S. Latino/a and Canadian diasporic second-generation coming-of-age stories and African child soldier narratives—reflect a broad geographical and linguistic range, drawing attention to constitutive relationality and various kinds of haunting to call upon a globally entangled sense of disappointment and responsibility in a profoundly critical register. These coming-of age stories signal the need to imagine alternative ethical and political frameworks for reconceptualising the way we think about knowledge, responsibility, and belonging in twenty-first century planetary relations. Even as they inevitably participate in the global market for stories of otherness and epistemological and/or material dispossession, these texts challenge generic and market expectations, troubling the reader’s easy consumption of them. The open-endedness and ambiguity in the indirect, yet insistent, rhetorical manoeuvres of these narratives urge us as readers to confront complicated questions about global solidarity if we are to respond ethically to global, national and transnational realities.</p>