Reimagining the White Child as Other: Taika Waititi's Decolonial Play in James and the Giant Peach With Taika and Friends

Vollständiger Abstract

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ABSTRACT This article examines how James and the Giant Peach with Taika and Friends ( JGPTF ) (2020) challenges the colonial logics embedded in Roald Dahl's construction of the universal white child. Through collaborative digital play, humour and Māori relational epistemologies, Taika Waititi unsettles James's position as the normative child of futurity, placing him under scrutiny as a culturally specific figure rather than centring him as innocent and universal. Drawing on Indigenous standpoint theory, settler futurity, play theory and performance analysis, the article shows how JGPTF revoices Dahl's text to expose its hierarchies of race, usefulness and value. Through close readings of vocal performance, parasocial domesticity, and the Cloud‐Men sequence, it argues that Waititi reverses the colonial “microscope,” foregrounding alternative models of childhood grounded in plurality, kinship and decolonial relationality.