Incarcerated Childhood and the Politics of Unchilding

Advances theorization of childhood in contexts of racialized settler-colonial political violence while acknowledging children's power to interrupt it.

Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian (Author)

9781108429870, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 5 September 2019

174 pages
23.5 x 15.7 x 1.4 cm, 0.38 kg

Who has the right to a safe and protected childhood? Incarcerated Childhood and the Politics of Unchilding deepens understanding of children as political capital in the hands of those in power, critically engaging children's voices alongside archival, historical, and ethnographic material in Palestine. Offering the concept of unchilding', Shalhoub-Kevorkian exposes the political work of violence designed to create, direct, govern, transform, and construct colonized children as dangerous, racialized others, enabling their eviction from the realm of childhood itself. Penetrating children's everyday intimate spaces and, simultaneously, their bodies and lives, unchilding works to enable a complex machinery of violence against Palestinian children: imprisonment, injuries, loss, trauma, and militarized political occupation. At the same time as the book documents violations of children's rights and the consequences this has for their present and future well-being, it charts children's resistance to and power to interrupt colonial violence, reclaiming childhood and, with it, Palestinian futures.

1. Childhood as political capital
2. Caging: from Lydda, 1948 to Hebron, 2018
3. 'Our existence is upsetting them': gendered violence and unchilding in the Naqab
4. 'They made my parents into prison guards': childhood, parenthood, and the carceral politics of home arrest
5. Unbreakable: the intimacy of torture and the children of Gaza
6. Children as political capital: unchilding and the incomplete death.

Subject Areas: Human rights [JPVH], Middle Eastern history [HBJF1]