We’ve invited Amanda Stuckey to reflect on her recent essay in Studies in American Fiction.
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The Buzz
New Scholarship
BOOK | The Kidnapping Club: Wall Street, Slavery, and Resistance on the Eve of the Civil War
In “The Kidnapping Club,” the historian Jonathan Daniel Wells describes the circle of slave catchers and police officers who terrorized New York’s Black population in the three decades before the Civil War. They snatched up children, as well as adults, and sold them into slavery. –New York Times
Opportunities
Thinking Through Childhood
“After Developmentalism: Toward a Theory of the Human”
Gabrielle Owen
This form of exploitation, the use of the child to meet adult needs, is built into the social conception of what a child is in the first place. If such a relation appears “natural” according to the definitional bounds of what a child is, then we must reckon with the degree to which exploitation is foundational to the Western idea of childhood itself. Read More
“Sentimental Origins: Queer Friendship and the Bildungsroman”
Kristen Proehl
Queer friendships challenge the devaluation of platonic relationships in contrast to romantic, familial, and/or biological relationships. Queer friendships, I argue, are a pervasive convention of YA literature and play a crucial role in many adolescent protagonists’ understanding of their identities and relation to the world. Read More
“Thinking Through Childhood, Sexuality, and Temporality in the Archives of the Perkins School for the Blind”
Mary Zaborskis
Expanding where and how we locate queerness in childhood makes visible the ways that children and youth institutions have been central to maintaining racialized, bourgeois, settler-colonial, able-bodied norms around gender and sexuality. Read More
“Charting Hawthorne: Critical Childhood Studies, Children’s Literature, and the Canon”
Laura Laffrado
Hawthorne’s works for children were trivialized as subliterary at the same moment that much of his other work was authorized and endorsed by scholars in central ways. Read More