“White child is good, black child his [orher] slave”: women, children, and empire in early nineteenth‐century India

Inner-City Children, Country Summers: Narrating American Childhood and the Geographies of Whiteness

“…Researchers have sought``to interrogate how [the child] comes to represent, and often codify, the prevailing ideologies of a given culture or historical period'' (Levander and Singley, 2003, page 3), including ideologies of whiteness (Dawkins, 2003;Ginsberg, 2003;Levander and Singley, 2003;Werrlein, 2004). The mutual constitution of whiteness and childhood is evident in recent analyses of 18th-century and 19th-century American narratives on slavery (Levander, 2004;Zwierlein, 2004) and British narratives concerning colonized subjects (Comer, 2005). Zwierlein (2004), for example, critically examines texts written by slaves and ex-slaves in pre-Civil War America.…”

“…Texts written by white abolitionists themselves often drew upon sentimentalized portrayals of innocent black childhoods tainted by slavery while also constructing adult blacks as fundamentally childlike, reassuring white readers that blacks, once freed, would be highly amenable to white tutelage. In her analysis of British narratives produced in colonial India, Comer (2005) similarly demonstrates how colonized subjects were frequently infantalized, while also showing how the narration of Indian parenting practices provided rhetorical justification for British intervention on the subcontinent in the name of spreading`civilization', which was to include, among other things, superior British modes of parenting [on the infantilization of racialized minorities, see also Aitken (2001a), McClintoch (1995, McNee (2004), and Nast (2000)]. The writings of British women were key here, constructing what Comer (2005, page 50), herself adapting Spivak, refers to as narratives of`W hite women ... saving brown children from brown parents''.…”