ABSTRACT
How might we interpret the continuing inability of most subaltern populations in the Global South to make claims based on the legal guarantees made available by the new regime of child rights governance? Through a focus on India, this chapter attempts to answer this question by foregrounding the critical contribution that historicizing rights-subjectivities in postcolonial contexts can make to our current research. It combines postcolonial theory with an analysis of postindependence policymaking to critically unpack India’s recent paradoxical move to deregulate child labour. The chapter explores how the contemporary logics of children’s rights governance reproduce existing hierarchies and legitimizes new exclusions. The chapter’s central argument is that historicizing rights-subjectivities can help us critically engage with how the differential working out of citizenship in postcolonial contexts informs the rights-based claims made by subaltern children and their communities. This historicizing would allow us to better attend to, politicize, and thereby work to narrow the stark gap between more recent laws that appear to uphold children’s rights and the realization of justice for marginalized communities.
