Suffering Childhood in Early America

In this thoughtful and closely observed book, Anna Mae Duane traces the work that children, both historical and symbolic, performed in mediating the unsettling realities of intercultural contact in British North America during the colonial and early national periods. Duane contends that children, specifically in their capacity for suffering, served complex ends in legitimating revolution and disabling claims to citizenship of some Americans, notably women, indigenous people, and slaves. Duane's perceptive analysis of the political and cultural discourse that circulated around the British Atlantic reveals that the figure of the child could be politically debilitating in one instance and a robust foundation for vigorous pursuit of liberty in another. She further demonstrates that the metaphors in which children figured so prominently subtly reconfigured each element of the equivalences they struck. In developing her arguments, Duane, a literary scholar, draws on now-canonical works such as The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself (1789), Hannah Webster Foster's The Coquette, or The History of Eliza Wharton: A Novel (1840), and other less conventional texts. Most intriguingly, the book's conclusion turns to materials produced by children at the New York African Free School. Organized into four topical chapters, the text is attentive to the impact of changing historical context on the problems examined. The first chapter contends that the trait of malleability that made children valuable cultural emissaries between Anglo colonists and indigenous peoples was also a source of anxiety. In the second chapter, Duane demonstrates that reports of Indians’ imperviousness to pain (their own, and the pain of suffering white children) fueled the idea that they could not become acceptable colonized subjects in the new nation. The third chapter examines seduction narratives in the context of shifting medical and evangelical discourse to consider how pregnancy disciplined women's bodies and barred them from participating in a political world premised on consent. In the final chapter Duane focuses on how the figure of the suffering slave child emerged from children's distinctive experiences of enslavement and how that image ultimately served slavery's challengers and, more surprisingly, its defenders as well

Art · Citizenship · Colonialism · Context (archaeology · Indigenous · Literature · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Sociology · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Gender Studies · History · Latin American and Latino Studies · Law · Race, History, and American Society

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