The ‘savage’ child and the nature of race: Posthuman interventions from New York City

Abstract

This article intervenes in the scholarship of race by way of the child, demonstrating how childhood is a doubly strategic site in disrupting the ontology of race as natural type or kind. One path involves disentangling children's association with nature, a tragic knot conjoined through a particular conception of the human. This strategy reveals the savage child that apprehends and sorts bodily differences, working to sustain the nature of race. Rejecting the savage child opens up a space to view actual children through a distinct posthuman lens that emphasizes laughter, play and surrealism in everyday life. Drawing on ethnographic material where children in New York City struggled with the visibility of the body, I demonstrate that alternative ontologies of race are possible and do exist. These tasks allow both race and childhood to emerge in a new light, with important implications for anthropology's cherished idea of the human.

Clowns, fools and the more-than-Adult toddler

“…Responding to the call in this Special Issue we have thought-with and played-with clown/toddler affinities as a way to counter Adultist and developmental figurations of the young child. This has helped us to resist humanist child/adult binaries that are founded on the assumption that children are adults-in-waiting and, inspired by Kromidas (2014), it has assisted us in starting to work towards posthuman imaginaries. Adultist constructions are entangled with colonial constructions of what it is to be a (hu)Man subject and are tightly bound up in a privileging of language (Cannella and Viruru, 2004; Gallacher, 2005).…”

“…The ways in which the figures of clown and child both are deployed to disparage and dismiss, echo the ways in which figures of female, black, queer, neurodiverse, people (as well as animals) are used as insults. Kromidas (2014) notes 'At one time or another, so-called savages, racialized Others, women, children and animals have all been conscripted outside the boundaries of "the human". Only animals and children remain' (p. 5).…”

Inhuman hands and missing child: Touching a literacy event in a Finnish primary school

“…She proposes to sense the ‘abyss, the edges of the limits of “inclusion” and “exclusion” before the binary of inside/outside, inclusion/exclusion, mattering/not-mattering can be seriously troubled’ (Barad, 2012: 8; our emphasis). Kromidas (2014: 426–427) puts it beautifully in the context of childhood:Rather than argue for extending the boundaries of the human to encompass those children presumably waiting at its gates, posthumanism encourages us to rethink the human itself through the child, and recuperate the human’s remainder into a new vision of the human being in the world.Braidotti (2013) argues that the ‘human’ is clearly a political category – white, male, heterosexual and able-bodied, although interestingly and of concern, age is not included (yet) (Murris, 2016). In contrast, youth is understood by Braidotti (2009: 526) as an ideal, like health, whiteness, masculinity and normality on which the metaphysics of otherness rests.…”

Children’s development, capability approaches and postdevelopmental child: The birth to four curriculum in South Africa

“…Children’s development is seen as dependent on others and they are not social persons in their own right (Christensen and Prout, 2002: 480). It is in that sense that developmental theories position child as the property of the adult, ‘the last savage’ (Kromidas, 2014: 429), therefore the terms ‘coloniser’ and ‘colonised’ take on a double meaning in the context of childhood (Cannella and Viruru, 2004: 87). So, whether childhood is seen as a phase in the life cycle of a human life, or a species, or a nation, chronological improvement to independence, autonomy and rationality is assumed, that is, the logic of colonialism.…”