Hear My Cry: A Manifesto for an Emancipatory Childhood Studies Approach to Children's Literature

Whenever we enter the experiencing of anything that is being talked about, we immediately find an intricacy with vast and obvious resources that go beyond the existing public language.

--Eugene Gendlin, "On Cultural Crossing"

[E]ach book proposes a concrete liberation on the basis of a particular alienation.

--Jean-Paul Sartre, Literature and Existentialism

"Be seated somewhere; and until you can speak pleasantly, remain silent."

--Mrs. Reed to the child Jane in Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

Of course what I felt then as an ape, I can represent now only in human terms, and therefore I misrepresent it, but although I cannot reach back to the truth of the old ape life, there is no doubt that it lies somewhere in the direction I have indicated.

--Rotpeter the Ape in Franz Kafka, "A Report to an Academy," The Complete Stories

In Knowledge and Human Interests, Jürgen Habermas conceives of the pursuit of knowledge as motivated by three different fundamental interests: technical, practical, and emancipatory. According to Habermas's model, an emancipatory human study must actively pursue three aims:

first[,] to understand the ideologically distorted subjective situation of some individual or group, second[,] to explore the forces that have caused that situation, and third[,] to show that these forces can be overcome through awareness of them on the part of the oppressed individual or group in question. (Dryzek qtd. in White 99)

In "Critical Theory as a Research Program," political scientist John S. Dryzek lists several global approaches to human studies that fit Habermas's emancipatory model, including feminism, Paulo Freire's pedagogy of the oppressed, and liberation theology. The silenced groups thematized by these approaches are females, the poor, and the geographically colonized.

Another silenced group has yet to find an emancipatory home in academia, but this absence is not due to a lack of available intellectual scaffolding. At least three current approaches to childhood fit Habermas's criteria (with a significant twist to be elaborated below): Alice Miller's radical revision of psychoanalytic theory, Lloyd deMause's psychohistorical hypothesis, and an emerging theory and practice of "aware parenting" based on the emancipatory effects on children when adults reevaluate their own childhood, adopt bodily attunement practices with babies (e.g., attuned touch, molding, nursing on cue) and practice nonviolent communication, including providing children with a safe space to express the full range and intensity of their feelings while being listened to (Solter, Omara, Wipfler, Walant, Gordon, Rosenberg).

These emancipatory theories of childhood are being argued and advanced primarily outside of mainstream academic discourse, through grassroots community groups, electronic mail, and conferences under private auspices. They are mutually compatible in many ways, though they concentrate on different areas of practice--adult psychotherapy (Miller), historical analysis (deMause), and day-to-day parenting (Solter et al.)--and there are serious disagreements within and between each camp. ¹ What the three theories have in common that makes them emancipatory is a commitment to understanding the situation of babies and children from a first-person point of view, exploring the contingent forces that block children's full emergence as expressive subjects, and discovering how these forces can be overcome. The significant twist is that this emancipation must be accomplished through adults transforming themselves and their own practices. The primary project of these theories and practices is not to change children but to change adults, especially adults as parents, teachers, and therapists. Whereas in a socializing model of childhood, adults try to mold children through training them (using methods ranging from brutal to "humane"), in an emancipatory model, adults look for ways to reenter and reevaluate their own childhood experience as part of a personal emancipatory human project as well as a larger project to be with, support, and negotiate conflict with children without oppressing them.

Why are these emancipatory approaches taking root outside...