The Children's Table: Childhood Studies and the HumanitiesAnnaMae Duane, Editor. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2013.

Abstract

The Children's Table: Childhood Studies and Humanities Anna Mae Duane, Editor. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2013.The idea of the children's signifies marginal presence of those who occupy space at family dinner table like at Thanksgiving. But it is also where true children's culture can be seen. Duane's work is a project that takes apart this hierarchical power structure that exists both in American dining rooms and in academy. Essays compiled in this volume recognize children's agency and resistance. They do so without necessarily denying fact that childhood is commonly understood as a temporary stage with dependence and fragility. Stemming from theories advanced by Michel Foucault and Judith Butler about power and identity, these essays examine subjectivity that children experience.Annette Ruth Appell problematizes fact that children are often framed as private subjects whose voices are rarely heard outside of their immediate environment, especially home. Appell argues that looking at children as legal subjects and as citizens will enable us to recognize children's agency and realize how children from different backgrounds may share similar interests and struggles. While Appell's approach is based in feminist tradition, Lucia Hodgson relies on critical race theory to examine how African Americans have historically been considered children, regardless of their age, and cannot be autonomous citizens. She shows that this history generates contradiction even for those who study children and who recognize children's agency at same level as their adult counterparts. Black youths may not possess as much agency as white youths because Black adults have been dissociated from full-agency citizenship. James Marten focuses on wartime children, including those during American Civil War. He postulates that children do not simply adopt ideas given by adults about a war but construct their own views about a conflict. John Wall agrees with these authors and states that there is a need for a social revolution that centers on children, just like gender, racial, and other minorities have had in varying degrees.Sophie Bell, Lesley Ginsberg, and Roy Kozlovsky, respectively, write on matter of discipline. Bell uses Unde Tom's Cabin (1852) to understand how race affected children's education and disciplining. Ginsberg focuses on antebellum American literature that described power relationship between children and adults. …