Child Slavery before and after Emancipation

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.

• 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.

'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