THE CHILDREN’S TABLE: Childhood Studies and the Humanities ed. by Anna Mae Duane (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: THE CHILDREN’S TABLE: Childhood Studies and the Humanities ed. by Anna Mae Duane Meredith A. Bak THE CHILDREN’S TABLE: Childhood Studies and the Humanities. Edited by Anna Mae Duane. Athens: University of Georgia Press. 2013. Linking scholarship across disciplines, time periods, and methods, The Children’s Table convincingly argues for the importance of a multidisciplinary approach in childhood studies, demonstrating how humanist perspectives and methods animate and, at times, construct child-related concerns in the sciences and social sciences. The first section, “Questioning the Autonomous Subject and Individual Rights,” concerns the figure of the child as a subject caught among competing (often contradictory) social, legal, and ideological systems. Essays focus on issues such as child-centered jurisprudence, juveniles within the justice system, applications of critical race theory to childhood studies, childhood in history and during the Civil War, and explorations of “childist” ethics. Vitally, the section demonstrates the importance of overcoming a central division within childhood studies, reconciling the divide in childhood studies scholarship between “real” and “rhetorical” children, arguing that a more comprehensive understanding of children’s subjectivity is gained through a multifaceted perspective. Section two, “Recalibrating the Work of Discipline,” explores a series of physical and discursive educational structures that position children within broader networks of power. Addressing the insistence of education in antebellum literature, sentimental education in Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), and architectural spaces for children in postwar England, the section investigates the disciplinary work of educational institutions and their capacity to mold children into future citizens. Section three, “Childhood Studies and the Queer Subject,” considers childhood studies and queer studies in tandem. Here too, the authors assert the importance of a queer studies perspective in bridging a gap between the biological child and the child as social construction. Contributions explore queer and gender-nonconforming children in literature and the intersection of childhood studies and adoption studies, all of which highlight ways of understanding identities and social units outside of binary oppositions and not solely based on genealogy or biology. The final section, “Childhood Studies: Theory, Practice, Pasts, and Futures,” argues that focusing on the child enables reconsiderations of history writ large, and explores how this line of inquiry might inform contemporary pedagogical practices in the field of childhood studies. Continuing to resolve the figures of the “real” and “imagined” child, authors explore how childhood is embodied and performed, how archival research can animate and reconstruct childhood, and the necessity of troubling traditionally rigid disciplinary boundaries when training the next generation of scholars in this new field. The book mobilizes an extensive theoretical network to provide grounding and justification of its project. Individual authors draw upon diverse scholarly traditions, including foundational texts in childhood studies written before the field was known as such. Individually, many essays return to the book’s overall aims, referencing other pieces throughout the volume, and each section is prefaced with introductory remarks that frame the core concerns to follow. Such an addition helpfully orients the [End Page 90] reader, and may be necessary, given the breadth of the material. The Children’s Table represents a substantial contribution to the field of childhood studies by outlining the political and ethical stakes of humanist inquiry in relation to work on childhood in the sciences and social sciences that has too often been regarded as holding exclusive political purchase. Foregrounding childhood studies’ multidisciplinarity, it presents the compelling argument for considering the concerns and epistemologies of individual areas not in contention with one another, but as overlapping parts of a larger whole to which the humanities make an essential contribution. Meredith A. Bak Franklin & Marshall College Copyright © 2014 Mid-America American Studies Association