Histories of childhood and man: Implications for childhood studies

Childhood studies is a field invested in history. This article positions histories of childhood within the context of anticolonial theory of the human, grounding the emergence of dominant Western stories of childhood in relation to Sylvia Wynter’s theorization of Man. Weaving together critical theory, theorizations of childhood, and epistemological challenges to childhood studies, this work illustrates the ways that childhood becomes knowable through the colonial and racial violence embedded in Western ideas of the human. This larger history provides context for the exclusionary nature of Western childhood and also points to childhood as a critical site for undoing Man.