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a Camera Obscura Book
Immediations: The Humanitarian Impulse in Documentary
By
Duke University Press
Copyright:
This content is made freely available by the publisher. It may not be redistributed or altered. All rights reserved.
ISBN electronic:
978-0-8223-7310-0
Publication date:
2017
Book Chapter
Feral Innocence: The Humanitarian Aesthetic of Dematerialized Child Labor
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Published:May 2017
This chapter examines how media advocacy initiatives aiming to eliminate coerced child labor dematerialize the role of children’s creative work in the production of humanitarian commodities. The chapter centers around the film Born into Brothels (2004), which documents the training of brothel children in India as photographers as a financial alternative to coerced sex work. The author argues that the humanitarian aesthetic of “feral innocence” ameliorates the threat posed by non-Western childhoods to the humanitarian fantasy of childhood as a state prior to culture, mediation, and labor. The chapter elaborates on this fantasy through a reading of François Truffaut’s film...
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