Mohamed Kamara – författare

This multi- disciplinary volume provides an innovative approach to children and violence, looking beyond the existing literature that focuses on child soldiers in the ‘Global South.’Harnessing expert contributions from over a dozen countries, the book examines the relationship between children and violence, with a focus on children ensnared in military conflict, embroiled in criminal gangs, and enmeshed in political activism. It analyses how children join fights, how they fight, and what happens to them after fighting officially ends. It addresses cutting- edge issues such as cyberwars, self-defence, intergenerational trauma, gender fluidity, racism and state surveillance. Throughout, the book underscores the need to respect the agency and dignity of children and youth, to build cultures of juvenile rights, and to think critically of the place of the child amid global power politics and decolonisation. Through accessible writing, and the provision of considerable new data, this book supports advocacy work and will enrich teaching and spark further academic research.This book will be of great interest to students of International Law, Human Rights, Childhood Studies, International Relations, Peace and Conflict Studies, Post- Conflict Studies, and Security Studies.The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) 4.0 license.

Colonial Legacies in Francophone African Literature: The School and the Invention of the Bourgeoisie by Mohamed Kamara examines the representation and lasting impact of the colonial school and bourgeoisie in Francophone sub-Saharan literature. Mohamed Kamara contends that the so-called indigenous colonial bourgeoisie was invented by the colonizer through the school to perpetuate the ideology of the colonizer, and he interrogates the policies and practices of the school and the ways they were informed by discourses of racial difference. While many works, like those authored by Gadjigo and Alessandri, have interrogated the impact of the colonial school on the African individual and society, they do not focus on the relationship between colonial education and the emergence of the African bourgeois and bourgeoise. Accordingly, this book analyzes the various literary strategies used in selected texts to paint a portrait of the school and the class it produced in view of showing the organic relationship between the two. This book adds a fresh perspective on the intimate connection between the school and social transformation in Francophone sub-Saharan Africa. Kamara suggests that the best solution for the continent resides in the continent’s ability to take what is good in its precolonial past and combine it with what makes sense in today’s reality.

What are Sierra Leonean and diaspora authors writing about today? What genres are they working in? What are future possibilities and directions of travel?The ethnically and linguistically diverse nation of Sierra Leone boasts a rich cultural legacy and, in the first decades of the twenty-first century, has built an internationally recognized literary canon despite the ravages caused by a brutal civil war and then the Ebola and Covid pandemics. While acknowledging the country's literary and creative heritage dating back to the mid-twentieth century, this book interrogates a number of prominent themes and critical perspectives on Sierra Leone's contemporary literature.Drawing from body studies, post-colonial theory, spatial theory, trauma theory, ecocriticism, history, and cultural studies, scholars and writers from West Africa and the United States tease out the beginnings, ecology, and dynamism of a bona fide national literature. They do so through a careful examination of such themes as social oppression and class distinction, dystopia, ethnocentricity, homophobia, misogyny and gender disparities, anthropocentrism, self-discovery, social transformation, identity, social degradation, genocide, and trauma, while also theorizing constructs such as home, migration, displacement, community, and return. Throughout, contributors argue for a better appreciation of a vibrant national literature by Sierra Leoneans themselves as well as its place in and contribution to world literature more generally.