Feral children: settler colonialism, progress, and the figure of the child

Rollo, Toby

doi:10.1080/2201473x.2016.1199826

Cited by 63 publications

(30 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…It is important for you to understand the ways in which coloniality creates a messy entanglement between childhood, memory, and borders that hinges upon violence. Toby Rollo (2016) positions the coloniality of childhood at the core of indigenous dispossession and coerced education, central to addressing present-day settler colonialism (p. 15). He insightfully traces the figure of the child within European and colonial logic through what he refers to as misopedy , an ancient form of social and political hierarchy that denigrates and subordinates children and childhood (p. 2).…”

Section: Childhood Memory and Bordersmentioning

confidence: 99%

Letter to my children from a place called Land

Solís

2017

Global Studies of Childhood

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Initially written in the form of an essay, this letter is written to my children from a place called Land. It unveils the entanglements coloniality creates in young, racialized, and gendered lives through the colonial logics structuring childhood, memory, and borders. From a diasporic perspective, Land emerges as flesh rooted in the saberes, the knowledge of our mothers and grandmothers. Remembering and returning to the places we call home, in my case, US/Mexico border, help us grapple with trauma and also learn ways people respond to the violence. I illuminate the colonial wounds we bare and the knowledge we carry to suture and heal.

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Section: Childhood Memory and Bordersmentioning

confidence: 99%

Letter to my children from a place called Land

Solís

2017

Global Studies of Childhood

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“…Oblivion Ethylene-or simply 'Oblivia'-bears within her name the burden of settler Australians' forced amnesia and attempts to erase Aboriginal history and existence through management of the lives and images of Aboriginal children. She is depicted all the more poignantly as a perennial child: the homo sacer of an Aboriginality already deprived of its form of life through colonisation and thus infantilised, dehumanised and rendered unprotectable (Rollo 2018a(Rollo , 2018b).…”

Section: Swan Girlmentioning

confidence: 99%

Settler-Colonial Violence and the ‘Wounded Aboriginal Child’: Reading Alexis Wright with Irene Watson (and Giorgio Agamben)

Faulkner

2020

Int J for Crime, Justice & Social Democracy

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Drawing on Alexis Wright’s novel The Swan Book and Irene Watson’s expansive critique of Australian law, this article locates within the settler–Australian imaginary the figure of the ‘wounded Aboriginal child’ as a site of contest between two rival sovereign logics: First Nations sovereignty (grounded in a spiritual connection to the land over tens of millennia) and settler sovereignty (imposed on Indigenous peoples by physical, legal and existential violence for 230 years). Through the conceptual landscape afforded by these writers, the article explores how the arenas of juvenile justice and child protection stage an occlusion of First Nations sovereignty, as a disappearing of the ‘Aboriginality’ of Aboriginal children under Australian settler law. Giorgio Agamben’s concept of potentiality is also drawn on to analyse this sovereign difference through the figures of Terra Nullius and ‘the child’.

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“…To be labelled infantile, childish, or childlike is the ultimate disqualification as it suggests that the target is emotionally and cognitively unqualified to participate in the safe and secure domain of exclusive adult privilege. This logic is then applied to other groups in order to racialize them, leading to the disqualification of black, indigenous, and other peoples as members of the immature and irrational "child-races" (Rollo 2018a(Rollo , 2018b. Likewise, in the end, it is only once an adult has begun exhibiting the supposedly degrading physical and mental dependency characteristic of childhood that they risk being abandoned and neglected.…”

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confidence: 99%

Babies and Boomers

Rollo

2020

Democratic Theory

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The response to the COVID-19 pandemic has revealed how public health decisions in mass liberal democracies always reflect a political tradeoff between protecting privileged groups and leaving more marginalized groups precariously exposed. Examining the “political epidemiology” of COVID-19, I focus on the ways that the lives and well-being of children are sacrificed to secure adult interests. I argue that in our efforts to protect older adults we have endangered children and abandoned the future of today’s youth. This, I conclude, is indicative of a liberal preoccupation with adults and adult forms of agency, a defect that can only be adequately challenged by working toward more robust forms of democratic inclusion that include children and youth.

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Feral children: settler colonialism, progress, and the figure of the child

Cited by 63 publications

References 12 publications

Letter to my children from a place called Land

Letter to my children from a place called Land

Settler-Colonial Violence and the ‘Wounded Aboriginal Child’: Reading Alexis Wright with Irene Watson (and Giorgio Agamben)

Babies and Boomers

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