Description: 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.
Brief description: 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.
Review Quotes: '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