Other Lullabies: Attacks on Blackness, Confusion of Tongues, and the Loss of Play

ABSTRACT Through a close reading of an anonymous lullaby from Latin America, the paper argues how colonial legacies and systemic racism, in the context of the structure of whiteness and the Covid pandemic, have had a nefarious impact on the material, symbolic, and psychic life of poor and working-class children and adolescents of color. The paper places a focus on Black kids. Left outside the symbolic, material, and legal order, these individuals suffer systemic attacks against their body and mind. This fact, in tandem with the devastating realities of the pandemic, have produced what the author calls an experience of “the end of the world.” Three main consequences of all these configurations are discussed: (1) failed identifications with whiteness; (2) loss of play; and (3) “confusion of tongues.” The need for new social lullabies, ones that invigorate our social capacity to dream the (colonial) state of affairs as being otherwise and that create communal solidarity, is proposed.