Browsing by Author "Alice Jossy Kyobutungi"

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Five Poems about Youth
(The Journal of African Youth Literature, 2020-07-02) Alice Jossy Kyobutungi
Five poems about youth Song of a Teenager Blessed Curse Let it not Hold You Back The Young Adult Character A Letter to my Mind
Negotiating Young Adulthood in Ugandan Literature: Identity in Kimenye’s Moses Series and Namukasa’s Stories
(East African Journal of Arts and Social Sciences, 2025-09-17) Alice Jossy Kyobutungi
This article examines the negotiation of young adulthood and identity formation in Ugandan literature through a close reading of Barbara Kimenye’s Moses series and Glaydah Namukasa’s short stories The Pact and Girlie. The study situates these works within broader African literary discourses on adolescence, transition, and socio-cultural belonging, with specific attention to the Ugandan postcolonial context. Drawing from postcolonial theory, youth studies, and identity construction frameworks, it interrogates how young protagonists navigate shifting roles, expectations, and self-concepts amidst the intersecting pressures of family, peers, education, and socio-economic change. Kimenye’s Moses series, set primarily in a Ugandan boarding school, portrays adolescence as a space of playful rebellion, communal bonding, and gradual moral negotiation. The protagonist, Moses, becomes a focal point for exploring the tensions between institutional authority and youthful agency, revealing how humour and camaraderie serve as tools for self-assertion and social learning. In contrast, Namukasa’s stories, set against contemporary urban and peri-urban backdrops, confront the challenges of girlhood and young womanhood, including issues of friendship, sexuality, betrayal, and socio-economic vulnerability. Through The Pact and Girlie, Namukasa foregrounds the gendered dimensions of young adulthood, showing how female protagonists navigate restrictive cultural scripts while asserting individual desires. By juxtaposing Kimenye’s light-hearted, male-centred narratives with Namukasa’s more intimate and gender-conscious portrayals, this article reveals how Ugandan children’s and young adult literature collectively engages with themes of resilience, negotiation, and identity-making. It argues that these works challenge linear, Western-centric models of adolescence by depicting it as a socially embedded, culturally mediated, and at times precarious process. The analysis highlights how language, narrative voice, and character agency reflect both continuity and change in Ugandan youth experiences. Ultimately, the study demonstrates that Kimenye and Namukasa contribute significantly to African literary representations of young adulthood, offering nuanced portraits that resist reductive categorisations. Their works not only document the lived realities of Ugandan youth but also invite critical reflection on how identity is actively shaped within complex socio-cultural and historical landscapes. This intersectional reading underscores the role of Ugandan literature in expanding global understandings of adolescence and identity beyond dominant Euro-American frameworks.
Rethinking Identity and Crisis: Representations of Young Adult Subjectivities in the Fiction of Selected Ugandan Women Writers
(International Journal of English Literature and Social Sciences., 2025-10-11) Alice Jossy Kyobutungi
This study, Rethinking Identity and Crisis: Representations of Young Adult Subjectivities in the Fiction of Selected Ugandan Women Writers, explores how Ugandan female authors negotiate identity, crisis, and selfhood through the lens of youth experience. Focusing on the works of Barbara Kimenye and Mary Karooro Okurut, this examination explores how these writers depict the evolving subjectivities of young adults within shifting sociocultural, political, and gendered contexts. The purpose is to investigate how young protagonists embody and contest tensions between tradition and modernity, individual freedom and communal obligation, and patriarchy and self-determination. Using textual and thematic analysis and drawing on postcolonial feminist and identity theories, the research interprets narrative strategies, character development, and themes of crisis and transformation. Close reading of selected novels reveals how gender, class, and cultural displacement intersect in the shaping of the perceptions of young adult characters. The findings show that both Kimenye and Okurut reimagine youth identity as a site of negotiation and resilience. Their narratives challenge colonial and patriarchal prescriptions of femininity and adulthood, portraying young adult characters who navigate inequality through resistance, self-assertion, and moral renewal. The study argues that crisis, rather than being destructive, becomes a generative force for redefining belonging, agency, and cultural continuity. Although limited to two authors, the research offers new insights into the symbolic economies of youth and gender in Ugandan literature. It contributes to African feminist criticism, Ugandan cultural studies, and youth identity scholarship by highlighting how women writers envision new forms of selfhood amid crisis and change.