In 1956 John F. Kennedy remarked that ‘If we are not the parents of little Vietnam, then surely we are the god-parents. We presided at its birth, we gave assistance to its life, we have helped to shape its future’ (Fishel, p. 18). Embedded in this statement is a central feature of imperial rhetoric. For what strikes us about imperialism is not so much its ubiquity, its totality and eventual dominance of global culture, but its astonishing capacity to mask its own contradictions. I want to suggest that the trope of the child, both explicitly and implicitly, offered a unique tool for managing the profound ambivalence of imperialism, because it absorbed and suppressed the contradictions of imperial discourse itself. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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