Chapter 26 - Children of the Future

Summary

This chapter explores the critical consensus that children are always figures of the future anchored to cisgendered heterosexual reproduction, as proposed by critics like Rebekah Sheldon, Lee Edelman, Lauren Berlant, and Robin Bernstein. Against this view of the child, this chapter foregrounds the experiences of children in the U.S. educational system and in racially differentiated ways that don’t necessarily spare white children from a high disregard for their welfare. What it finds is that the “sacralization of the Child,” as Edelman put it, is a thin discursive tissue that distracts from pervasive negligence and racial anxiety. It concludes with a meditation on Ezra Pound’s famous imagist poem “In the Station of the Metro,” which the critic Josephine Park has identified as an important figure in Asian American literature because of the ways in which it popularized a highly orientalized idea of Chinese and Japanese culture. What is the view from the crowd the poem conjures, which is racially diverse and getting more so? What kind of claim on childhood does this crowd make?