Cinematic Representations of Girls and War : The Displaced Protagonists of Johnny Mad Dog and War Witch
For over a decade, I have been analyzing literature and film dealing with the general subject of women and war in Africa, reading the creative works in terms of the research being done by feminist geographers and other social scientists attempting to include gender as a category in the analysis of Africa s civil wars. The purpose of this paper will be to extend that project to include two feature film narratives about girls who have been forced to leave their homes because of violent conflict: Johnny Mad Dog (2008), a French film made in Liberia and based on Immanuel Dongala's novel, and War Witch (2012), a Canadian film shot largely in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Both films reflect the experiences of the over nine million persons displaced by the continent s civil wars, and each confronts the differences that characterize displacement for girls as opposed to boys. My analysis will identify gender-specific elements in the narratives, considering them in relation to each other and to the research of social scientists such as Chris Coulter, Susan McKay, and Dyan Mazurana, whose scholarship focuses on girls in conflict zones