ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how fetishism, as a combined dynamic of avoidance and fascination that racism relies upon, is built from a contingent positioning constructed for children: Idiotic child. It examines how racism's irrational basis resists conventional pedagogical strategies of provision of information, including attending to the affective and relational role accorded children in sustaining such pedagogies. The chapter highlights an important differentiation identified by Octave Mannoni between the wilful ignorance warranted for adults by the figure of the child, and that of children themselves. Feminist and postcolonial sensibilities are brought into play to reconsider the status of psychoanalysis as a resource for antiracist pedagogies, situating that theory through reading Mannoni alongside as well as against Fanon. The chapter considers Mannoni's analysis in terms of the structure of racist discourse, specifically by addressing forms of racialised stereotyping enacted within recent UK media coverage of Brexit, where immigrants are racialised as other and so not seen as belonging to the national polity.
