A child is testifying: Testimony and the cultural construction of childhood in a trans/national frame

Abstract

This essay discusses the controversy over the reception of Deborah Ellis's book of children's testimony, Three Wishes: Palestinian and Israeli Children Speak. By situating her book and the controversy surrounding it in the context of the modern ideal of childhood as a site of psychoanalytical knowledge, I argue that the possibility of children testifying to trauma and the violence of war is over‐determined by the production of competing fantasies as to who or what lies at the origins of violence. From these competing fantasies emerge transnational complicities of innocence that disavow the narratives of trauma and wartime conflict as told by children.

Keywords:

• childhood
• testimony
• Palestinian–Israeli conflict
• psychoanalysis
• transnationalism

Notes

1. Recent lobbying efforts announced by the Canadian Jewish Congress include “participation in Royal Commissions on Hate propaganda in the 1960s and the prosecution of Nazi War Criminals in Canada in the 1980s, as well as significant input into Canadian policy‐making on education, freedom of religion, and other human rights issues” (http://www.cjc/ca/).

2. Along with the expansion of transnational capitalism during the late 1950s to the mid‐1970s, cultural imperialism shifted dramatically in its modes of meaning production with the notable commodity expansion of technologies of representation such as film, photography, computers, and other digital media. Globalization is a term that both signifies this effect of a one‐dimensional homogenization of meaning and value and it is the process of putting it into place – as if “globalization” is inevitable and “already in existence”, as it were.

3. See further Emberley, especially 91–115, in which I discuss, in Freud's Totem and Taboo, for example, the production of the varied deployments of the infantilized figure of the aboriginal.