Centering the problem child: Temporality, colonialism, and theories of the child

Abstract

What would it mean to center theories of the child around those who are evacuated from childhood? I propose the idea of the “problem child” as an encapsulation of those who are constructed outside of Western understandings of childhood. In this essay, I explore how the problem child illuminates colonial entanglements between childhood and constructions of time, and the implications this holds for theories of the child. To do so, I position Carla Shalaby’s Troublemakers as a provocation to theories of childhood: her masterful portraits illustrate how problem children are constructed as such temporally, repeatedly narrated as late or out-of-sync. Put otherwise, Shalaby’s centered focus on troublemakers highlights the ways in which temporality is used as a limit to constructions of the child. I build on Shalaby’s provocation to argue that the ways in which childhood and temporality interlock are a production of colonial understandings of subjectivity, in which childhood is co-constructed with linear time. In asking what it might mean to center the problem child, I argue for the contextualization of dominant Western understandings of the child in the colonial violence in which they were produced in order to challenge assumed connections between the child and temporality.

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