Beyond the Gaze: A Decolonial Approach to the Cinematic Child

Scholarship on the child in cinema often imbue the child’s perspective with a transformative potential to elaborate new accounts of the world. This argument not only sidesteps the artificial nature of this viewpoint—constructed by an adult ‘as if’ able to speak for a child (Lury 2022)—but also rests upon a Western idea(l) of the child as an innocent, unprejudiced being whose lack of knowledge about the world makes way for new forms of understanding. From a rejection of the impossibility and coloniality of the child’s gaze, this paper argues for a decolonial approach to the cinematic child that situates its worlding capacities on the relations (to the human and non-human world) in which children are embedded. It traces the controversy over Behn Zeitlin’s Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012)—read both as a ‘Western fantasy of the primitive’ (Brown 2013) and a film inspired by Indigenous epistemologies (Ashton 2022)—to explore the limits of such an approach, criticising the film’s inability to account for the pasts invoked by its spatial setting. In response, the paper proposes an idea of “relation” which operates across different temporal and spatial scales, and thus incorporates the colonial legacies implicit in the film.