The experience of childhood from a decolonial and aesthetic analysis of cultural products: Modernity, racism and racialization of class relations

Abstract

In this work we carry out an exercise in critical interpretation of the notion of childhood from a decolonial and aesthetic perspective. In this sense, we present some considerations on the concept and its operability for the analysis. Then we approach different cultural products where we problematize the category of childhood in the singular as part of the modern project. The decolonial interpretive key allows us to unravel the social meanings and relations of domination that gave rise to the definition of the category in Europe and its correlation in Latin America. In this sense, from colonization to the present, forms of classification are articulated - according to skin color and then transposition to class relations - that imply the subordination of the other. From the Global South, childhood (s) as a category must be read within the geopolitical disputes that shaped our territories and capitalist relations of domination.