Dominance, Survivance, and Resistance: Reconceptualizing Childhoods Through Literature

Childhood is a social construction and discursive site of contestation that extends beyond the dominant paradigm of developmental psychology. These constructions of childhood are predominantly projects undertaken by adults through research, educational practice, and artistic endeavors such as the writing of literature. While the field of childhood studies claims to be inter- and multidisciplinary, it continues to be dominated by sociological approaches and is evasive of colonial and racial analytic tools to attend to the histories of Black, Brown, and Indigenous children and childhoods. Beginning from my own history of childhood trauma in the process of dislocation from the postcolonial Caribbean to the settler colonial Canadian nation-state, I turn to literary children who endure the colonial violence of rape to understand ongoing settler colonialism. Drawing on the work of Edward Said and Erica Burman, I construct a contrapuntal child-as-method to trace the figure and rhetorical function of the child across the literatures of dominance, survivance, and resistance. First, I read the state-sanctioned Survivors Speak report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada which I understand as a site of Indigenous and settler trauma. Drawing on Cathy Caruth’s literary trauma theory, I argue that the report is a site where settlers reconcile their own lost imperial childhood which is rooted in romantic and psychoanalytic notions of the innocent and ignorant child. Next, I read Tomson Highway’s trickster novel, Kiss of the Fur Queen, while drawing on Gerald Vizenor’s notions of survivance and the postindian warrior to theorize the postindian child. I bridge scholarship on civilizational progress and development, children’s sexuality, innocence, and queer theory’s subjectless critique, which undoes identity. I extend this to Vizenor’s notion of the postindian as a similar kind of subjectless critique that interpellates the reader to a critical reading of contradictory simulations. Here, the resistive and healing tendencies of the postindian child engages in processes of disidentification from dominant simulations of a colonial generational order while turning to a maternal and gynocratic order. Finally, I read Nalo Hopkinson’s Afrofuturistic novel, Midnight Robber, to engage conversations about childhood agency through the Afro-Caribbean girl child. Drawing on Caribbean poet Kamau Brathwaite’s notion of arrivance, popularized in Jodi Byrd’s critique of settler colonial binaries, I theorize the arrivant child, or the dislocated child of the enslaved with no option to return home. I argue that the arrivant child is a destabilizing figure that offers insights into relational forms of agency as it remakes home from the maroon on stolen Indigenous land. I show how the arrivant child is in a double bind such that for some children their actions, regardless of their agentic capacity, make them complicit in their own oppression. Finally, I conclude the dissertation by exploring how childhood as curriculum can transform subjectivity and open and ethical space through the literary imaginaries of imperialisms Others.

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