KEYNOTE ADDRESS

The Vernacular History of the Child Lumpen

In recent years, the children’s publishing and entertainment industry has grown at the behest of new models of parenting and child-friendly approaches to pedagogy. Sensitivity toward children’s needs has grown in proportion to the brutality and privation associated with the neoliberal state’s abdication of even minimal social-welfare responsibilities. In a gig economy, reproduction of one’s own ability to work is the fundamental DIY, not to mention health, education, and other social needs. The images of the great exodus of migrant labor from cities at the beginning of the pandemic (2020) brought to light the state’s sociopathic depravity, but also manifested something strange and curious alongside. Working class boys and couples on the long march were producing tik-tok videos of each other expressing a joie de vivre, seemingly at odds with the sanctimoniousness and sentimentality of their media representations. Scrolling through children’s everyday tik-tok productions, I find them to be striving after a cartoon-affect—contorting their bodies and faces into impossible animated postures and movements—resonating with Walter Benjamin’s description of children as akin to “pre-animistic” beings: children don’t just play with toys, but evince a desire to become toys, mere things. The cruel-laughter track that forms the background music for the children’s antics indicates what kinds of things or objects they have become. My talk traces historical instances of this barbaric tendency within vernacular representations from colonial to present-day North India, especially touching on a Hindi memoir (Pandey Bechan Sharma “Ugra’s” Apni Khabar 1960) and an Urdu female bildungsroman (Ismat Chughtai’s Terhi Lakir, 1944).

Nandini Chandra

Department of English

University of Hawaiʻi, Mānoa