Suffering Childhood In Early America
Download and Read Suffering Childhood In Early America full books in PDF, ePUB, and Kindle. Read online free Suffering Childhood In Early America ebook anywhere anytime directly on your device. We cannot guarantee that every ebooks is available!
Suffering Childhood in Early America
Author | : Anna Mae Duane |
Publisher | : University of Georgia Press |
Total Pages | : 229 |
Release | : 2011-11-01 |
Genre | : Literary Criticism |
ISBN | : 0820340588 |
Download Suffering Childhood in Early America Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle
Nothing tugs on American heartstrings more than an image of a suffering child. Anna Mae Duane goes back to the nation's violent beginnings to examine how the ideal of childhood in early America was fundamental to forging concepts of ethnicity, race, and gender. Duane argues that children had long been used to symbolize subservience, but in the New World those old associations took on more meaning. Drawing on a wide range of early American writing, she 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. 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, and with time childhood became freighted with associations of vulnerability, suffering, and victimhood. As Duane looks at how ideas about the child and childhood were manipulated by the colonizers and the colonized alike, she reveals a powerful line of colonizing logic in which dependence and vulnerability are assigned great emotional weight. 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.
Suffering Childhood in Early America Related Books
Pages: 229
Pages: 302
Pages: 446
Pages: 672
Pages: 280