The dangers of the single story: 1 Child-soldiers in literary fiction and film

Focusing on the paradox between innocence and responsibility generated by the term child-soldiers, which is treated differently in literary and cinematographic works from the North and the South, this article uses postcolonial theory in order to deconstruct ‘the single story’ that may be erasing these children’s many stories. Accordingly, the analysis brings to the fore both the supposed universality of a hegemonic notion of childhood, revealing it as a regulatory discourse which produces diverse subalternities, and the articulation of this notion within an Africanist discourse that legitimizes neocolonial practices in varied domains.