Child Slavery before and after Emancipation: An Argument for Child-Centered Slavery Studies

by Anna Mae Duane (Editor)

Overview

If we are to fully understand how slavery survived legal abolition, we must grapple with the work that abolition has left undone, and dismantle the structures that abolition has left in place. Child Slavery before and after Emancipation seeks to enable a vital conversation between historical and modern slavery studies - two fields that have traditionally run along parallel tracks rather than in relation to one another. In this collection, Anna Mae Duane and her interdisciplinary group of contributors seek to build historical and contemporary bridges between race-based chattel slavery and other forms of forced child labor, offering a series of case studies that illuminate the varied roles of enslaved children. Duane provides a provocative, historically grounded set of inquiries that suggest how attending to child slaves can help to better define both slavery and freedom.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781107566705
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	02/21/2017
Series:	Slaveries since Emancipation
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	5.91(w) x 8.98(h) x 0.71(d)

About the Author

Anna Mae Duane is Associate Professor of English at the University of Connecticut. She is the author of Suffering Childhood in Early America: Violence, Race and the Making of the Child Victim (2010), the editor of The Children's Table: Childhood Studies and the Humanities (2013), and the co-editor of Who Writes for Black Children?: African American Children's Literature before 1900 (with Katharine Capshaw, forthcoming). She is also the co-editor of Common-place.org.

Table of Contents

Introduction: when is a child a slave? Anna Mae Duane; Part I: Introduction. The child as gift: the logic of the peculium in perpetuating logics of enslavement Anna Mae Duane; 1. 'Remember, dear, when the Yankees came through here I was only ten years old': valuing the enslaved child of the WPA slave narratives Karen Sánchez-Eppler; 2. The slave child as 'gift': involutions of proprietary and familial relations in the slaveholding household before emancipation Sarah Winter; Part II: Introduction. The public's claim to the private child: slaveries defined by a child's value Anna Mae Duane; 3. The white slave: American girlhood, race, and memory at the turn of the century Micki McElya; 4. Child's play: schools not jails Erica Meiners; 5. Born free in the master's house: children and gradual emancipation in the early American North Sarah L. H. Gronningsater; Part III: Introduction. The child as a pivot point between consent and complicity Anna Mae Duane; 6. Protecting the young and the innocent: age and consent in the enforcement of the White Slave Traffic Act Jessica R. Pliley; 7. Slavery and the recruitment of child soldiers David M. Rosen; 8. Notions of African childhood in abolitionist discourses: colonial and post-colonial humanitarianism in the fight against child slavery Audra A. Diptee; Part IV: Introduction. Children's voices, children's freedom Anna Mae Duane; 9. 'If I got a chance to talk to the world': voice, agency, and claiming rights in narratives of contemporary child slavery Anna Mae Duane; 10. Child domestic labor: 'when I play with the master's children, I must always let them win' Jonathan Blagbrough and Gary Craig; 11. The global human rights of modern child slaves John Wall.

Editorial Reviews

‘These consistently excellent, highly insightful essays compel us to reconsider the problem of slavery as history and also as an agonizing contemporary challenge. The case developed here for a child-centered study of slavery, past and present, is truly compelling.' James Brewer Stewart, Founder, Historians Against Slavery

‘In this excellent and original collection, Anna Mae Duane and her team have carefully documented the political considerations, historical variations, and lived experiences that have too often been overshadowed by superficial appeals to tarnished innocence.' Joel Quirk, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, and author of The Anti-Slavery Project

‘In a period preoccupied with collecting micro-level data on slavery's past and present, this collection of empirically informative and theoretically rich essays lays a thicket of thorny questions about the relationships among childhood, slavery, adulthood, consent, vulnerability, and freedom before readers. Duane has done an exceptional job of delineating these vital conceptual discussions that run through the volume and their urgent implications for current anti-slavery thinking and practice.' Jane Anna Gordon, author of Creolizing Political Theory: Reading Rousseau through Frantz Fanon

'This collection of 11 interdisciplinary essays combines case studies from the 19th century to the present, arguing that examining historical and modern child slavery together enriches and informs its history and vice versa. … This thought-provoking book advocates interdisciplinary, integrated research centering on global child slavery, attentive to children’s voices and responsive to human rights.' N. Zmora, CHOICE

From the Publisher