£10 (pbk) Children show the strangest things to theorists who pay attention. The figure of the child often indicates spontaneity, innocence and originality as well as pure simplicity and imitation. The child can represent freedom from the self-consciousness, sexuality and seriousness associated with adulthood: a natural state that is accessible to the adult imagination but, because it is simply 'there', is difficult to examine critically. The books discussed here are part of a scholarly move to examine this cultural and political positioning of the child and to ask how and why childhood has become a magic mirror for culturally mediated adult desires.The status of the child as both a site of individual identity and a collective fantasy of an innocent past promoting a free future marks childhood as a linchpin holding together apparently obvious, but historically contingent, cultural assumptions (Arie`s, 1962;Steedman, 1995). These books span diverse fields but they are all asking 'what is this future invested in the child? Who is it for and what is it free from?' Their investigation of the child as bearing the figurative burden of what
This article offers a consideration of the figure of the child in Benh Zeitlin's film Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012), a vibrant but urgent ecological drama motivated by the devastating aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. It examines how a film that on its release was praised as an American survival story focused on a feisty young heroine can be more productively understood through a postcolonial lens as a radical vision of world ecology underpinned by a complex critique of childhood, development, and marginality. Exploring how vectors of racial, economic, and environmental relations intersect in the film's fantastical form, the focus is shifted from survival to the connectivity that the precarious postcolonial child enables amongst actual and mythological animals and between past, present, and future time-worlds. As such, the child de-centres the contemporary notion of the human and the tenets of development, progress, and mastery over nature that hold it in place. By delineating the material coordinates of the film in terms of the capitalist, neo-imperialist world-system and analyzing how its mixing of the real and the fantastic elaborates upon the causes and responses to environmental disaster, the article shows how the postcolonial child provokes new approaches to ecological relations.
This article uses the term anticipatory anti-colonial writing to discuss the In 1936 Swami and FriendsNarayan s fiction is often described as apolitical and Anand s as politically
This article reflects on the power of poetry to reframe the concepts of home, arrival and belonging, each of which is important in understanding the relationship between migration and culture. It traces the journey of a collective poem – ‘Grapes in My Father’s Yard’ – that was created during the Material Stories of Migration project in Sheffield in 2015; was performed at Migration Matters Festival and has since been shared in multiple digital and material formats between 2015 and 2022. The text’s trajectory demonstrates poetry’s capacity to transgress structural and grammatical norms and capture that which is absent, ambiguous and elusive in the idea of ‘home’. The poem intertwines different languages and flows between them, enacting the give and take of linguistic and cultural translation. This article draws on follow-up interviews and ongoing discussion with project participants and creative facilitators to explore how the ‘storying’ of migrant lives is an ongoing creative process that poetry can illuminate. ‘Grapes in My Father’s Yard’ articulates how post-arrival life for migrants is not a linear, forward-moving process but a kind of re-dwelling in lost homes and landscapes, the beginning of a micro-bordering which continues for years. The poem calls on us to read between the lines and to seek out the silences, as much as it asks us to listen to the words.
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