Why historicize rights-subjectivities? Children’s rights, compulsory schooling, and the deregulation of child labor in India

Abstract

How might we interpret the continuing inability of most marginal populations in the majority world to make claims based on the legal guarantees made available by the new regime of child rights governance? Through a focus on India, this article 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 post-independence policy-making and utilizes these frameworks to more critically read the recent paradoxical move to deregulate child labor in India. By disclosing how contemporary logics of child rights governance both reproduce existing heirarchies and legitimize new exclusions, the article’s central argument is that incorporating the differential working out of citizenship is essential to developing a more politicized reading of the structural exclusions that mark child rights governance within postcolonial contexts.