UNICEF, (des)colonidades e infâncias: vidas negras importam

Abstract

This article seeks to problematize UNICEF practices of (de)colonization and, paradoxically, of silencing and controlling the bodies of children and by updating the mechanisms of coloniality in black lives, based on a conversation between Mbembe, Foucault, Sontag, Carneiro, Gonzalez e Butler. The text is the result of research with documents from the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF). We work with documents on the situation of Brazilian childhood, produced in Portuguese by the aforementioned international agency in the country. The framing of the lives of black children is problematized as is how they are constructed as precarious to the point of being vulnerable by biopolitical and necropolitical mechanisms of disauthorization and discursive interdiction of all who are classified as non-human, therefore, target colonization. Finally, it addresses fragments of UNICEF reports in which the biopolitical and necropolitical frameworks of war are materialized by tanatopolitics.

Keywords

• coloniality
• necropolitics
• biopolitics
• unicef
• black childhoods