ABSTRACT
The final chapter of Part II of the book begins by revisiting Freud’s trope, ‘His Majesty the Baby’, as a provocative exploration of adult narcissistic desires and projections onto children and childhood. This is alongside revisiting Kuan-Hsing Chen’s strategies of decolonisation and de-imperialisation to explore the psychic investments in imperialist developmentalism, as well as in children as expressions of adult desires. The second half reviews some alternative resources that show it is possible to counter developmentalism. The first example discussed, combining biographical with political developmental registers, draws on Lea Ypi’s account of growing up in Albania under, and then experiencing the shift from, soviet to capitalist orders. This depicts a process of recruitment into the narrative of (European) development evoking not only its incomprehensibility but also the sense of bewilderment, even as this process both exploits and pathologises the habits and modes of compliant subjectivity that characterised the former regime. On a more positive note, the chapter concludes with a discussion of an indicative example of what antidevelopmental accounts might look like, in the form of Gottleib and Loach’s edited collection. This is, I suggest, antidevelopmentalism in action, resisting abstracting the bearing, birthing and caring for children from diverse cultural-political settings. The shifting geographical and political contexts, through displacement and migration, are shown to institute changes as a result of minoritised status but also generate new adaptations of cultural-religious and everyday practices.
