Narrow Escapes: Gendered Adolescent Resistance to Intergenerational Neo/Colonial Violence across Time and Space

Using Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Doris Pilkington/ Nuri Garimara’s Rabbit Proof Fence, and Uwem Akpan’s Fattening for Gabon, this paper charts the resistant resilience of three young protagonists who negotiate recurring forms of neo/colonial violence in disparate contexts. Each navigates brutal conditions through intuitive, rebellious, transformative acts that disrupt dominant temporal and spatial scales to reframe subaltern histories. Distinct but related struggles for wider horizons of possibility reveal cumulative ruptures in intergenerational care across chronic, if scattered, hegemonies. All call into question assumptions informing mainstream coming-ofage novels through narrow but instructive escapes from over-determined sites of gendered, sexualized and racialized subordination.