The investigation of childhoods in the postcolonial context can be understood as part of a global history that reconstructs the different and changing living conditions and lifestyles of children worldwide in their spatial-temporal dimensions. There are singular attempts to conceive such a global history, but these are either based again on the ideological pattern of ‘Western modernism’ (Stearns, 2006), limited to the ‘Western world’ (Fass, 2007; 2012; Fass and Grossberg, 2011) or the compilation of single contributions from previous childhood research (Morrison, 2012). With this book, I am also not pursuing the task of writing a comprehensive history of childhood(s) in their manifestations and appearances from precolonial, via colonial, to postcolonial periods. Instead, I focus on illuminating the lives of children in today’s Global South in some aspects of the postcolonial constellation which seem important to me. Nevertheless, it must be borne in mind that this postcolonial constellation also has repercussions on the childhoods in the Global North, whether it is by migration processes and the corresponding problematizations of national and cultural identities, or growing doubts about the future of the ‘Western’ childhood pattern.
For the study of postcolonial childhoods, I try to use theories that are generally referred to as postcolonial and have been formulated since the 1970s in the Global North as well as in the Global South. This is not an easy task to do, since these theories rarely address questions of childhood. The topic of childhood is, at best, taken up in theories and studies which point to colonial paternalism as a kind of childhood project or understand paternalism as a colonization of childhoods.
Postcolonial theories do not form a homogeneous unity. Some emphasize cultural, others economic and social aspects. Basically, these are not strict theories that claim to provide a comprehensive explanation of today’s postcolonial world constellation and its origins. All of them, however, contribute in their own way to making conceptions of civilization, progress and development disputable; these conceptions have emerged as myths since the ‘discovery’ of the Americas and the Enlightenment in Europe and serve as ideological justifications for the conquest of the extra-European world. However, postcolonial theories do not discard all the ideas and concepts of the European Enlightenment. They challenge the intercultural, international and intercontinental dialogue on equal terms.
This is immensely important for the understanding of postcolonial childhoods and the possible ways of their decolonization, as it encourages and facilitates the understanding of these childhoods as the result of different and often contradictory social and cultural processes. It has not been easy for me, and probably not always satisfactory, to reconstruct such childhoods and the notions of it in this complex way, especially since it cannot be understood as a kind of final product, but as a permanently changing and in itself differentiated and contradictory sociocultural phenomenon. Moreover, I have at least the ambition to make the children visible who are embodied in these childhoods as actors who influence the conditions of their lives, and thus also the postcolonial constellation.
Another difficulty arises from the fact that, as an adult who has grown up and lives in a European context, I am writing about children whose lives and experiences are very different from mine and which I can only know partially and from my own view. I mainly rely on my own observations and conversations, as well as on empirical research that has been carried out in different places with a theoretical and methodological approach directed to the actual life, reality and subjectivity of the children. In working through certain empirical studies and their conclusions critically, I am aware that I could not have done it better myself. A particular risk, however, is always present when I make childhood or child policy proposals and construct alternatives. Even though, as I hope, they are adequately justified, the smell of the European know-it-all is always attached to them, and they could fall under suspicion of reproducing colonial messages. This is particularly true when I refer to geographic areas and sociocultural circumstances that deal with colonial heritage. I can only hope not to be self-centred on standards and not to use them in a manner which I criticize as Eurocentric in the book.
I can certainly not completely escape the contradictions and ambivalences between universalistic and cultural-relativistic modes of reflection. In the book, it will become clear that I regard certain universalistic norms as indispensable, but I also feel that they must be scrutinized for their own historical and cultural prerequisites, and must not be politically instrumentalized and imposed on the people from ‘above’. With regard to the decolonization of childhoods, this is especially true for the basic assumption that children are to be respected as social subjects who have the inalienable right to a worthy living future and the right to meaningful participation in all matters that concern them. I see it as an exciting yet also risky enterprise to find criteria for a good childhood or various good childhoods that are valid beyond the postcolonial constellation for all children of the world. When I discuss these and similar questions, I will try to use universal criteria in such a way that they remain open to cultural diversity without losing myself in cultural relativisms.
I will explain some of the terms commonly used in the book. When I speak of the Global South, and the Global North, I have a geopolitical, not geographical, meaning in mind, which takes into account the division and inequality between and within different regions of the world. These cannot be understood any longer as a mere inequality of economic and political power between the ‘West and the rest’ (Hall, 1992), if we look, for example, at China or the so-called tiger states in Asia, or at the so-called threshold countries in other parts of the world. But the colonialist conquests and the model of capitalist industrialization, which have emanated from Europe, continue to work to this day, and are manifested in the power structures of what we call globalization. The two terms largely correspond to what is also known as the majority world and the minority world, in order to express the fact that the vast majority of the world’s population and particularly the world’s children live in the Global South. However, it must be borne in mind that the Global South also extends into the Global North, especially through migration processes as well as the economically and politically induced marginalization of certain regions in Europe and North America itself. I explicitly avoid the term ‘developing countries’ – often used even in United Nations documents – as it implies that the so-called developed countries embody a generalized, particularly advanced ideal by which the state of other countries and the cultural level of other people can be measured.
In Part I, I explore various ways to understand childhoods in the postcolonial context. In Chapter 1, I discuss some key aspects of the postcolonial analysis of childhood, such as the question of the scope and limitations of the childhood pattern emerging in modern Europe, how social inequality that is aggravated by capitalist globalization impacts on children’s life prospects as well as on the specific modes of agency emerging in children of the Global South, and how they are to be conceptually understood. In Chapter 2, I reconstruct the way in which the colonialization process and the ideologies that supported it have used the metaphor of childhood, and investigate the extent to which they are reproduced in processes of colonizing childhoods. In Chapter 3, which concludes Part I of the book, I sum up various contributions to postcolonial theory, which I have used to analyse postcolonial childhoods.
In Part II of the book, I reconstruct the life and experiences of children under colonial and postcolonial rule in different regions of the world emphasizing particular aspects. In Chapter 4, using case studies from the British Empire, the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, I investigate the ways in which the emergence of nation states was connected with violence against certain groups of children and was legitimized with the alleged necessity of their civilization. In Chapter 5, with a view to the