Children and the Politics of CultureThe bodies and minds of children--and the very space of children--are under assault. This is the message we receive from daily news headlines about violence, sexual abuse, exploitation, and neglect of children, and from a proliferation of books in recent years representing the domain of contemporary childhood as threatened, invaded, polluted, and "stolen" by adults. Through a series of essays that explore the global dimensions of children at risk, an international group of researchers and policymakers discuss the notion of children's rights, and in particular the claim that every child has a right to a cultural identity. Explorations of children's situations in Japan, Korea, Singapore, South Africa, England, Norway, the United States, Brazil, and Germany reveal how children's everyday lives and futures are often the stakes in contemporary battles that adults wage over definitions of cultural identity and state cultural policies. Throughout this volume, the authors address the complex and often ambiguous implications of the concept of rights. For example, it may be used to defend indigenous children from radically assimilationist or even genocidal state policies; but it may also be used to legitimate racist institutions. A substantive introduction by the editor examines global political economic frameworks for the cultural debates affecting children and traces intriguing, sometimes surprising, threads throughout the papers. In addition to the editor, the contributors are Norma Field, Marilyn Ivy, Mary John, Hae-joang Cho, Saya Shiraishi, Vivienne Wee, Pamela Reynolds, Kathleen Hall, Ruth Mandel, Manuela Carneiro da Cunha, and Njabulo Ndebele. |
From inside the book
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... labor , and capital . The child — as a crucial modern symbol of nature and the object of protection and enculturation — is at risk of being written off as yet another postmodern discursive fiction . What are the implications for society ...
... labor associated with differentiated spheres of repro- duction / consumption and production . Here we need not fall back on a notion of capitalism " calling for " or " bringing into being " a certain type of childhood — an ...
... labor , and Keynesian welfare state was only a relatively stable aggregate of diverse practices and perspectives , whose organization became increasingly ten- uous as gathering crises of capital overaccumulation transformed exist- ing ...
... labor " as they perform their socially defined tasks in Japanese schools and homes . Field argues that Japanese childhood is being colonized by a logic of ceaseless production , taking over the school system and extending down to very ...
... labor , while also promoting education . Article 28 affirms the child's right to free ed- ucation , with a view to eliminating " ignorance and illiteracy throughout the world and facilitating access to scientific and technical knowledge ...
Contents
The Child as Laborer and Consumer The Disappearance of Childhood in Contemporary Japan | 51 |
Have You Seen Me? Recovering the Inner Child in Late TwentiethCentury America | 79 |
Childrens Rights in a FreeMarket Culture | 105 |
CHILDREN CULTURAL IDENTITY AND THE STATE | 139 |
Children in the Examination War in South Korea A Cultural Analysis | 141 |
Childrens Stories and the State in New Order Indonesia | 169 |
Children Population Policy and the State in Singapore | 184 |
Youth and the Politics of Culture in South Africa | 218 |
SecondGeneration Noncitizens Children of the Turkish Migrant Diaspora in Germany | 265 |
Children Politics and Culture The Case of Brazilian Indians | 282 |
The Cultural Fallout of Chernobyl Radiation in Norwegian Sami Regions Implications for Children | 292 |
THE RECOVERY AND RECONSTRUCTION OF CHILDHOOD? | 319 |
Recovering Childhood Children in South African National Reconstruction | 321 |
The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child | 335 |
About the Contributors | 353 |
357 | |
CHILDREN AND THE POLITICS OF MINORITY CULTURAL IDENTITY | 241 |
Theres a Time to Act English and a Time to Act Indian The Politics of Identity among BritishSikh Teenagers | 243 |