Cosmopolitan Guilt: Reading African Narratives of Children in Crisis

Abstract

This dissertation investigates how literature that depicts turbulent events taking place in foreign locations demands to be read through a cosmopolitan lens. This becomes particularly relevant for Western readers such as myself when they encounter real-life stories about children in crisis and are forced to navigate their emotional reactions to learning about this suffering. At its core, cosmopolitanism is an outlook that captures the feeling of being a citizen of the world. This belief encompasses an array of ethical responsibilities. Crisis narratives (such as memoirs about African children in crisis) challenge cosmopolitan believers’ worldviews by testing their local and global solidarities to close and distant neighbors. To unpack how cosmopolitanism functions as a “natural” method for people to relate to and understand each other across geographical and cultural divides, it is important to look at how it has been conceptualized by philosophers in the past and in our own globalized present, a theoretical overview that I undertake in the opening two chapters of this dissertation. I conceptualize cosmopolitanism as an approach that allows readers to use their imagination (i.e. their ability to create meaning using their awareness of the world) to understand and identify with the conditions of the characters in the text as fellow global citizens. In the remaining chapters, I engage in a close analysis of two primary texts, the memoirs Bite of the Mango by Mariatu Kamara and A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah, in order to flesh out the process through which Western readers such as myself and African storytellers such as Kamara and Beah do, and do not, interact as cosmopolitan agents and to explore how reading as a cosmopolitan act reveals both the reader’s and the storyteller’s views on local and global issues.