Young and free: [post]colonial ontologies of childhood, memory and history in Australia

Tracing the complex yet intimate relationship between a present-day national obsession with childhood and a colonial past with which Australia as a nation has not adequately come to terms, Young and Free: [Post]colonial Ontologies of Childhood, Memory and History in Australia draws on philosophy, literature, film and testimony. The result is a demonstration of how anxiety about childhood has become a screen for more fundamental and intractable issues that vex Australian social and political life. Joanne Faulkner argues that by interpreting these anxieties in their relation to settler-colonial Australia's unresolved conflict with Aboriginal people, new ways of conceiving of Australian community may be opened.

Young and Free engages with philosophical and literary characterizations of childhood, from Locke and Rousseau to Freud, Bergson, Benjamin, Agamben, Lacan, Rancière and Halbwachs. The author's psychoanalytic approach is supplemented by an engagement with contemporary political philosophy that informs her critique of the concepts of the subject, sovereignty and knowledge, resulting in a speculative postcolonial model of the subject.