Event date: Thursday 7 April 2011, 5.30 p.m. – 6.30 p.m.
Location: Faculty of Arts and Philosophy, Blandijnberg 2, Faculty Room 

“Suffering Childhood in Early America” given by Dr. Anna Mae Duane (University of Connecticut)

“This talk focuses on the U.S.’s violent beginnings to examine how ideas about childhood helped to forge concepts of ethnicity, race, and gender. Drawing on a wide range of early American writing, Duane explores how the figure of a suffering child accrued political weight as the work of infantilization connected the child to Native Americans, slaves, and women. When early Americans sought to make sense of intercultural contact – and the conflict that often resulted – they used the figure of the child to help displace their own fear of lost control and shifting power. In the making of the young nation, the figure of the child emerged as a vital conceptual tool for coming to terms with the effects of cultural and colonial violence. With time, Duane argues, childhood became freighted with associations of vulnerability and suffering that shaped the perception of childhood itself as a state of ‘natural’ victimhood.”

Anna Mae Duane is the Director of American Studies and Associate Professor of English at the University of Connecticut. She is currently a Fulbright lecturer at the Université Libre de Bruxelles. She is the author of Suffering Childhood in Early America: Colonial Violence and the Making of the Child Victim (U of Georgia P, 2010). Her other publications include contributions to the Cambridge History of the American Novel (2011), an article in the Norton edition of Charlotte Temple (2010), and an article in American Literature (Sept. 2010). She has received an NEH fellowship for her work on the New York African Free School and is the co-editor of a book showcasing their work, Hope is the First Great Blessing: Leaves from the New York African Free School (New York Historical Society, 2008). She is currently working on a book that analyzes the intertwined discourses of African colonization and education by tracing the careers of the alumni of the New York African Free School as they became the first generation of African American doctors, actors, and abolitionists.