In a Child's Eyes (during the Spanish Civil War) (original) (raw)

How modernity’s futurism puts children in the front line

Childhood, 2018

What conceptualisations of the child might explain the communicative and rhetorical significance of their selection as targets in acts of terror? It is argued that the child as an embodiment of modernity’s enthralment to the future’s promises of progress or redemption puts them on this front line. As an alternative to modernity’s futurism, Surrealism presents us with a conceptualisation of the child that anticipates contemporary ideas of ‘queerness’. The recognition of the child’s transgressive attitude to the credo of modernity can be a way of resisting increasingly instrumentalised ways of thinking about children.

Anti-militaristic and Pacifist Values across Spanish Children’s Literature

De Gruyter eBooks, 2022

Historical fiction facilitates a close examination of lesser-known historical episodes, and of what Miguel de Unamuno (1902) called "intra-history": the small occurrences and stories that happen below and around great battles or other significant events. Teresa Colomer (2009) has highlighted the socialising role of children's literature, revealing its importance in transmitting social and national values. Literature, in general, tends to contribute to ideological transmission, but the ideological influence in children's literature is even more evident, since young readers' attitudes are still open to being shaped (Etxaniz Erle 2004). Xabier Etxaniz Erle argues, following Colomer (1999, 15), when literature shows the past through the social or cultural values of the present, it has an ideological aim. Therefore, we maintain that the children's historical novel can play a significant role in the image of the past that is conveyed to new generations. The Spanish publishing industry has released many children's books on historical topics throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In Critical History of Children's and Youth Literature in Today's Spain (1939-2015) (Historia crítica de la Literatura Infantil y Juvenil en la España actual [1939-2015], 2018), García Padrino explores Spain's recovery of the historical past, finding that works for children address every historical period. Meanwhile, Olaziregi (2008) points out that adult literature too has often addressed the Civil War. Indeed, the Spanish Civil War is the most popular historical theme in today's literary market, pointing to the conflict's persistent relevance in shaping twenty-first-century Spanish society. Dolores Vilavedra (2006) and Regueiro (2011) have already explored how literary narratives of the Civil War have evolved in adult literature. The first works, such as those by Valenzuela or Fortún, were written by those who lived through the conflict and are striking for their lack of idealisation and Manichaeism, which we understand as the tendency to reduce reality to a radical opposition between good and bad. In the 1980s and 1990s, novels such as Manuel Rivas' The Carpenter's Pencil (El lápiz del Carpintero, 1998), turned republican heroes into something like lay saints (Regueiro 2003), but maintain a Manichaen position. Twenty-firstcentury works, however, tended to diminish that Manichaeism. They carved out above all spaces for the losers' perspective and for leftist ideology, yet nevertheless sought to humanise all the contenders, eliminating demonisation and idealisation, and bringing in principles such as pacifism.

A Reflexive Consideration of the Apocalyptic Child

Plural Feminisms: Narrativising Resistance as Everyday Praxis, 2022

Content Warning: Mental illness, suicide. Now more than ever before in my life, the apocalypse seems upon us. Toronto is noticeably hotter than ever before, and I find myself packing my parka away earlier each year. At the time of writing, I am reaching the end of graduate school, and the unlikely tenure-track position, as well as the almost certainty of financial strain under capitalism, shift more into focus. The COVID-19 pandemic has scraped my mentally ill brain dry to the point that I feel incapable of any promised return (Derrida, 1994) to “normal.” Now more than ever before in my life, having a child has seemed completely untenable. Now more than ever before in my life, there seems to be no future (Edelman, 2004). As a queer person, I have struggled with the heteronormativity of reproduction. The “relation of cruel optimism [that] exists” from my feminine child-bearing potential acts as a potential “obstacle to [the] flourishing” of my politics, which centre on anti-capitalist, anti-racist educational activism (Berlant, 2011). Indeed, the futurity inherent in (white) reproduction sanctions violence against marginalized groups to secure the continuance of neoliberal capitalism. If the “Child remains the perpetual horizon of every acknowledged politics,” how can I ethically engage in reproductive futurism when it is oppositional to my politics (Edelman, 2004)? As a mentally ill person, I have struggled with the potentiality of passing on illness. Experiencing its onset at a young age makes me imagine it festering, latent, in my child’s brain. I wonder whether it will lead to experiences similar to mine: questioning my grievability (Butler, 2010) in the wake of suicide; feeling the stigma of pathologization; understanding the uncomfortable proximity to the “being-already-there of death" (Foucault, 2006). This chapter will interrogate issues of natality (Trimble, 2019), reproductive futurity under capitalism (Edelman, 2004), queerness (Stockton, 2009), the privilege of (white) innocence (Stockton, 2016), and madness via an autoethnographic methodology within a poststructuralist and queer feminist framework. I also intend to explore the tensions between the desire for apocalyptic “endangerment” of the child and the feasibility of happiness amidst a perceived lack of futurity due to the material consequences of oppressive systemic structures, as well as varying individual intersectional struggles.

Children as potential – a window to cultural ideals, anxieties and conflicts

Children's Geographies, 2019

Drawing on sociologist Norbert Elias' theory of civilising processes, this article argues for a perspective on children as 'potential'. With this notion, we focus on the efforts, hopes and fears that adult society invest in children and through them in future society. Seeing this investment as a result of historical processes and social dynamics, we hold that the perspective of children as potenial provides a window to deep-felt ideals and anxieties in society, the norms of civilised society that are established as well as the ongoing struggles about these norms. In this way, studying investments in children are particularly significant for social science. Yet, as cultural norms have to pass through the transformative world of childhood to be reproduced, we also have to explore how children actively affect the outcome of the civilising projects and the processes of continuity and change.

BECOMING CHILD, BECOMING OTHER: CHILDHOOD AS SIGNIFIER

In in Anja Muller, Ed. (2013). Childhood in the English Renaissance, 145-153. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2013

A discussion of "childhood" as signifier in post-modernity, which draws on the work of Deleuze and Guattari, Lyotard, Marcuse, and the Latin American philosopher of childhood, Walter Kohan.

Suffering Child: An Embodiment of War and Its Aftermath in Post-Sandinista Nicaragua

Duke University Press eBooks, 2019

This article considers how the ripple effects of war and its aftermath are embodied and lived even after being mediated by time, space, and social status. Through a case study of a Nicaraguan boy and his natal family, I argue that the legacy of war, structural violence, and endemic poverty are chronic and lingering and emerge from internationally and locally produced traumatogenic social relations. I use a phenomenological approach to distress to minimize the clinical tendency to pathologize individual sufferers, and to illuminate the destructive capacities of politically and historically produced conditions of social "normal abnormality." The continuum of lived experience of social suffering is poignantly articulated by a member of one of society's most vulnerable sectors, a ten-yearold child, [children, social suffering, war and structural violence, phenomenology of distress, Nicaragua] no hay dolor que dure cien anos, ni cuerpo que lo resista,. .. no hay dolor mas grande que el dolor de ser vivo there is no pain that lasts a hundred years, nor a body that will endure it, ... there is no pain greater than the pain of being alive-a Nicaraguan saying A nthropology as a discipline describes human experiences that otherwise might not be known to others. The stories of those who have endured and survived war, either directly or indirectly, are important because they illustrate how history and ideology, and social structures and geopolitics, collide to shape lived experience. 1 What follows is a story of a ten-year-old boy, Daniel, and his 33-year-old mother, Maria del Carmen, who live in a squatter settlement perched above the city

THE CHILD AND POSTMODERN SUBJECTIVITY

The Western subject defines itself in great part according to the relations between reason and desire. Plato’s tripartite soul, the first statement of this relation that has come down to us, stipulates that reason, the smallest of the three parts, must rule emotion and appetite. This normative self-structure, which dominates the Western patriarchal tradition, must exclude the Other in the form of child, woman, “native,” and “slave”—any form of subjectivity in which body and feeling interplay in a different relation with reason. This structure began to unravel in the 19th and 20th centuries, along with the understanding of reason which holds it in place. One of the involuntary prophets of this long transitional moment—along with women, people of color, the artist, the mad, and the aboriginal--is the child. Childhood as a psychological and an epistemological condition assumed iconic significance among the Romantics, for whom the child began to stand in, with the artist, as prophet of a new subjective economy—an economy in which Plato’s three dimensions entered a crisis of interpretation. Enlightenment Reason had already shown its dark underside in the excesses of the French Revolution and the rise of hyper-rationalized state bureaucracies which followed reinforced the sense, growing throughout the 19th century, that it hides an irrational core. Nietzsche, Dostoievsky and Freud began charting dimensions of the psyche which progressively deconstructed Plato’s linear hierarchy, and lead to an ideal of subjectivity as a subject-in-process, undergoing a continual reconstruction guided by dialogue rather than domination. The implications of a form of adult subjectivity informed by child subjectivity apply, not just to superego formation, or to social, political and economic relations, but to a model of education which allows for the reinscription of the emergent self in culture and society—i.e., a form of schooling devoted, not to reproduction but to transformation.