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Introduction

It is one of the self-comprehensions of today’s socio-scientific childhood research that children and childhoods cannot be considered as natural phenomena, but are shaped by the social conditions, social relations and cultural contexts they are part of. Moreover, no talk about children and childhood is ever perfectly matched to reality – it is always filtered through the visions and values of those who talk and write about children and childhood. In this book, children are seen as actors who are never unaffected and uninfluenced by predetermined social structures and cultural patterns, but who can nevertheless influence, shape and thus also modify these structures and patterns. This also applies to the development and appearance of what we call childhood. That is why it is important to emphasize that there is not only one childhood, but always different childhoods, be it with regard to the history, to each individual life course, or to different societies and cultures. In the context of the presentation of children and childhoods in this book, I aim to express children’s perceptions and actions.

Why is this book devoted to childhoods in the postcolonial context, and what do I mean by that? The European colonialization of other continents, which has been going on since the 15th century, still has consequences for the power structures of today’s world and people’s ways of thinking in different parts of the world. These are postcolonial in the double sense that they follow the colonial epoch in time and challenge criticism of the aftermath of colonialization. The term postcolonial is thus used to criticize the existing unequal global power structures that are remainders of colonialism, and thus can also be described as neo-colonial. When I speak of childhoods in the postcolonial context or postcolonial childhoods, I want to express that even today’s childhoods, and in reflections, talk and writings about them, the colonialization of ‘alien’ parts of the earth continues to affect them and therefore must be critically examined. In doing so, I will also show that the dominant understanding of childhood in Europe is closely interwoven with the process of colonialization.

One aspect of reflecting about postcolonial childhoods is that the people living in Europe (as involuntary descendants of the colonial powers) know little about children and childhoods outside Europe and North America. One reason for this is that they have largely been seen in the light of a ‘“Western” narrative of modernization’ (Morrison, 2012: 3). The history of childhood in non-Western regions has been ignored for a long time or has been viewed in a very one-sided light due to existing stereotypes about childhood. In the media, but also in scientific representations, for example, children in Africa are almost exclusively regarded as AIDS orphans, street children, child soldiers or trafficked girls, often portrayed as helpless and needy victims in exceptional circumstances. They do not seem to have a ‘normal’ life or characteristics comparable to the lives of ‘our’ children. Their lives are being degraded, and they are also pushed to the brink of the world, made ‘children out of place’ (Connolly and Ennew, 1996; Invernizzi et al, 2017). On the contrary, I want to put these children, who represent the large and growing majority of children on earth, in the centre of this book and express their lives in their many facets.

Childhood research to date and the categories developed by it are largely based on children and childhood in the Global North. The categories are occasionally subjected to an ideological-critical deconstruction in which their role of legitimization is made visible (see, for example, James et al, 1998; Prout, 2005). In so far as childhood research refers to children and childhood in the Global South, it is usually restricted to ethnographic descriptions without questioning the categories themselves and without taking the postcolonial power constellation into consideration. In this book, which I also see as a contribution to the decolonization of research on childhood and children’s rights, I will show how this constellation affects children in the former colonial territories as well as how they are perceived and dealt with.

A postcolonial constellation to me is an unequal material and ideological or epistemic power relationship that leaves little space for childhoods that do not correspond to the pattern of childhood that dominates the Global North. On the material level, the life of most children in the Global South, or the former colonial territories, is determined by the fact that they are cut off from vital resources and have to grow up under precarious conditions. These conditions result from the continuing economic and political dominance of the Global North and corresponding dependencies, disadvantages and multiple (mostly racist) discrimination. On the epistemological level, the lifeforms of childhood are made invisible, based on or influenced by inherited cultural traditions that appear to be unfathomable. This is all the more so since, in the dominant discourses, these modes of life are not valued as being childhood, children are at best mocked and bemused, sometimes feared, and labelled as ‘children without childhood’. However, the postcolonial exercise of power does not merely replace the ‘old’ childhood with a ‘new’ childhood, but rather creates hybrid structures in which subversive potential can also be concealed. This potential cannot be raised if only one or more ‘original’ childhoods are sought. Such a search is necessarily caught up in myths and idealization. Yet it is also not worth denying them. For this reason, I am not concerned with searching for ‘the’ lost childhood, but instead with the most possibly precise appraisal of the childhood that has emerged from the postcolonial constellation and continues to emerge.

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 colonial and postcolonial history of Latin America, I examine how the discourse on ‘illegitimate’ and ‘irregular’ children led to racist arbitrariness against the children of indigenous and African origin. In Chapter 6, with a view to contemporary Africa, I examine some postcolonial pitfalls of education and child policy, and ask about the possibilities of overcoming paternalistic practices and amplifying children’s participation.

In Part III of the book, I ask about the importance of children’s rights and social movements for the decolonization of childhoods and portray some efforts into this direction. In Chapter 7, I address the question of how to deal with human rights in general and children’s rights in particular in terms of global social inequality and postcolonial power relations. In Chapter 8, I discuss various forms of paternalism and ask how they could be overcome in the field of rights-based children’s protection and participation. In Chapter 9, I show how child-led movements in the Global South can be understood as a form of citizenship from below that could pave the way for a childhood that emancipates itself from illegitimate dependencies and subjugations. The examples given are not only valid for the Global South, but own special characteristics caused by postcolonial inequality and oppression.

The book is an interim analysis of my studies on childhoods in the postcolonial context, mainly those of the Global South. They have a largely exploratory character. In further studies, it will be beneficial to deal with the concrete agency of children and young people of the Global South even more intensively than in this volume, and to get to the roots of its manifestations, conditions and impacts. At the end of the book, I formulate some questions and outline possible perspectives for further research and better child policies in favour of excluded and marginalized children and their liberation from postcolonial dominance.