Reflections of Primitivism: Development, Progress and Civilization in Imperial America, 1898–1914

Gagen, Elizabeth

doi:10.1080/14733280601108122

Cited by 23 publications

(20 citation statements)

References 16 publications

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“…(Archard 1993: 35) Or, to reiterate Gagen's (2007) argument, children everywhere are universally barbarized.…”

Section: The Paradoxical Presence Of the European Childmentioning

confidence: 93%

“…Elizabeth Gagen (2007) is one of few writers who turn a critical gaze on the construction of the universalized European child within colonial discourses. In the context of US imperial discourses, she argues that theories of child development were interwoven with ideas about foreign underdevelopment, informing not only US imperial projects, but also its thinking about itself by universally barbarizing children everywhere.…”

Section: Infantilism Within Colonial and Neocolonial Discoursesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Left in the Waiting Room of History?

Finn

McEwan

2013

Interventions

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“…(Archard 1993: 35) Or, to reiterate Gagen's (2007) argument, children everywhere are universally barbarized.…”

Section: The Paradoxical Presence Of the European Childmentioning

confidence: 93%

Section: Infantilism Within Colonial and Neocolonial Discoursesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Left in the Waiting Room of History?

Finn

McEwan

2013

Interventions

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“…The Playground Movement incorporated this language of differentiation and colonial mentality into its purpose (Gagen, 2007). Natural metaphors were often used to distinguish what was normal and play was seen as an important method to modify the body.…”

Section: Biopolitics Citizenship and The Colonial Bodymentioning

confidence: 99%

Exploring race and nation in playground propaganda in early twentieth-century Toronto

Murnaghan

2013

International Journal of Play

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This article examines how a regime of knowledge was enacted on the bodies of children in Toronto playgrounds at the turn of the twentieth century. Using Foucault's description of biopower, or the 'power over life', I explore how performances of the body (visibilities) were integral in creating citizens in a colonial context (identities). I conduct a detailed reading of one part of Foucault's 'great bipolar technology', the biopolitical regulation of children as part of a population in order to highlight the importance of playground discourses and applications in the construction of subjects and a future nation.

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“…this is a notable gap, as children made up a large portion of the audiences, particularly of the educational films (Griffiths 2002). G. Stanley Hall's recapitulation thesis -whereby children follow through the processes of primitive man's development to modern Western culture in their rise from youth to maturity -was based on the idea that non-Western cultures were stunted, and incompletely developed (Gagen 2007). discourses of immaturity saturate colonial texts: indigenous peoples are written as primitive, their practices are uncivilized, their traditions barbaric, and their cultures are undeveloped.…”

Section: Salvage Ethnography and Ethnographic Cinemamentioning

confidence: 99%

Projections of race, nature, and ethnographic childhood in early educational cinema at the national museum of canada

Murnaghan

McCreary

2016

Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography

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In this article, we examine depictions of race, nature, and childhood in Harlan Ingersoll Smith's early ethnographic films at the National Museum of Canada. Created in the 1920s for a children's education programme, Smith's films construct ethnographic portraits of different Indigenous peoples in Western Canada. We demonstrate how museum education appropriated Indigeneity as a discursive resource to immerse viewing children in particular narratives of Canadian national heritage and development. The films worked through a complex double movement, bringing children in the Ottawa museum audience into association with Indigenous children based on shared experience as children while simultaneously differentiating Indigenous peoples as Other. The films inculcated white youth at the museum in a romanticized connection to Canada's prehistory through knowledge of the nation's Indigenous peoples as well as nature. In the films, the position of Indigeneity within the future remained ambiguous (traditional practices sometimes disappearing, sometimes enduring). Yet, despite Smith's uncertainty about colonial beliefs in the disappearance of Indigeneity, his films nonetheless presented the teleological development of the settler nation as certain. Our article highlights how thinking about children, as audience for and thematic focus of these films, extends discussions of the geographies of film, of children, and of settler colonial nationalism.

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Reflections of Primitivism: Development, Progress and Civilization in Imperial America, 1898–1914

Cited by 23 publications

References 16 publications

Left in the Waiting Room of History?

Left in the Waiting Room of History?

Exploring race and nation in playground propaganda in early twentieth-century Toronto

Projections of race, nature, and ethnographic childhood in early educational cinema at the national museum of canada

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