Review Article: The child/the future

Abstract

£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

Speculative Child Figures at the End of the (White) World

“…(p. vii). The child-future join has been problematized in childhood studies (e.g., Barnsley, 2010;Kraftl, 2020;Taylor, 2017), including how "children of color are not fetishized in the ways white children are in hopeful imaginations of the future" (Joo, 2018, p. 5). 1 Nevertheless, just like the kind of postapocalyptic blockbusters alluded to above, it is "not sufficient to renounce or denounce the child" because the child figure continues to do important work in the making of worlds (Sheldon, 2016, p. 21).…”