Rowman & Littlefield Publishers / Rowman & Littlefield International
Pages: 248
•
Trim: 6¼ x 9⅜
978-1-78348-306-8 • Hardback • May 2016 • $176.00 • (£137.00)
978-1-78348-307-5 • Paperback • May 2016 • $59.00 • (£45.00)
978-1-78348-308-2 • eBook • May 2016 • $56.00 • (£43.00)
Joanne Faulkner is Lecturer in Philosophy and Women’s and Gender Studies, in the School of Humanities and Languages at the University of New South Wales.
Acknowledgements / Introduction: Childhood and the Oblivion of Memory / Part I: Child / 1. Visions of Autonomy: Figures of the Child as Model of the Human / 2. Phantasms of Subjection and the Oblivion of the Other / 3. The Uncanny Child as Postcolonial Unconscious and Conscience / Part II: Memory / 4. Children Lost and Stolen: Collective Memory, Childhood and the Stolen Generations / 5. The Child as Witness / 6. Nostalgia, Colonialism, and Aboriginal Community / Part III: History / 7. ‘Stronger Futures’? The Peculiar Temporalities of Postcolonial Community / 8. The Emergent Community: Counting the Part that Has No Part / Conclusion: The Metonymic Drift of the Symptom; Between the Child and Politics / Bibliography / Index
This new book by Joanne Faulkner is a welcome attempt to map the longstanding obsession with childhood and a colonial past that still discomforts many, and to unravel the links between the two … It is well-written and engaging and will be read with interest by those working across broad studies of children and childhood. It will also be of interest to postcolonial scholars who will welcome its consideration of a settler-colonial nation’s uneasy attempts to come to terms with its origins.
— Journal of Australian Studies
[Young and Free] provides an important resource for children’s literary and cultural studies scholars in its sustained account of how the modern concept of childhood colludes with colonialism to displace Indigenous peoples and how this displacement in turn continues to support white settler identity.
— Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures
In this important, expansive and generous book, Joanne Faulkner unsettles persistent themes in Australian discourses of childhood, home and nation, showing the continuing reach of the colonial imaginary in their contemporary idealisations. In particular this book makes a vital contribution to studies of ‘white’ fantasies of origin and their material—and often violent—effects.
— Alison Ravenscroft, author of The Postcolonial Eye