ABSTRACT

They move from age-old myths into novels, from novels into movies, animations and television series into video games and cartoons-and back again. They are exceptionally mobile, these fictional children who are not quite of this world, who belong to the pristine jungle, such as Mowgli, or to the ghost world, such as Azaro. They are freely moving between nature and culture, life and death, and they are eagerly transgressing the boundaries of media and cultures. Because of their striking versatility and uncanny adoptability, they have been celebrated as inspiring embodiments of the hybrid and fluid subjectivity that would characterize the age of postcolonial globalization. Their strong subversive potential, it is said, might explode all hackneyed racial, ethnic and cultural binary hierarchies. In the view of postcolonial scholar Bill Ashcroft, for instance, the feral child is able “to indicate possibilities of human adaptation” (Ashcroft 1993, 52). Ashcroft associates that capacity for adaptation with the postcolonial condition, in which migration and interculturality have become the norm. A very specific imagination of the border-crossing child, the Yoruba concept of abiku-that is, the child who incessantly travels between the human world and the ghost world-is also said to represent the borderless, fluid world of globalization. The Nigerian-British writer Ben Okri explains what the world looks like through the eyes of the abiku: “There are no divisions really in life, just a constant flow, forming and reforming.” For the abiku, the world is “a surging and constantly transmogrifying reality” (Hawley 1995, 36). In this productive new way, according to Okri, we should perceive the contemporary world.