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NATURE, NURTURE, NATION: RACE AND CHILDHOOD
IN TRANSATLANTIC AMERICAN DISCOURSES OF SLAVERY
by
Lucia Hodgson
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(ENGLISH)
August 2009
Copyright 2009 Lucia Hodgson
Object Description
| Title | Nature, nurture, nation: race and childhood in transatlantic American discourses of slavery |
| Author | Hodgson, Lucia |
| Author email | lhodgson@usc.edu; luciakhodgson@gmail.com |
| Degree | Doctor of Philosophy |
| Document type | Dissertation |
| Degree program | English |
| School | College of Letters, Arts and Sciences |
| Date defended/completed | 2009-05-06 |
| Date submitted | 2009 |
| Restricted until | Unrestricted |
| Date published | 2009-07-14 |
| Advisor (committee chair) |
Kaplan, Carla Rowe, John Carlos |
| Advisor (committee member) |
Boone, Joseph Allen Halttunen, Karen |
| Abstract | By the 1850s, the analogy between African-American slaves and children had become a truism, so embedded in American culture and so ubiquitous that it effectively eluded interrogation. This dissertation argues that the slave/child analogy has roots in the adaptation of the political, epistemological and educational writings of John Locke to the British American colonial context, that it was crucial to transatlantic American discourses of race and slavery from the Revolution to the Civil War, and that it configured and racialized American representations of the child during the same period. This project illustrates how the representation of slave subjectivity in American textual culture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries mirrors (and distorts) three key facets of modern childhood: its incapacity for reasoned consent, its position on the border of the human/animal divide, and its malleability. Historically, the slave/child analogy has helped to justify the slave's exclusion from political participation and national belonging and to naturalize his/her subjection to absolute authority and to disciplinary educational practices. At the same time, the analogy produces instability and dissonance that facilitate the deconstruction of dominant ideologies of race, gender and class. The figure of the slave child, in particular, crystallizes the illogic and incoherence of the analogy.; In the Revolutionary Era, the slave/child analogy facilitated the colonial bid for independence from imperial control, while its overtly racialized form, the Negro/child analogy, supported an inferior political status for subjects of African descent in the new nation. In the decades immediately following the Revolution, the analogy was transformed by the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, becoming infused with an early Romantic primitivism. The idealization of the primitive inverted the Lockean binaries that underwrote imperialism, providing a mechanism for transatlantic writers to question American slavery and racial ideology. By the early nineteenth century, however, American Romantic idealizations of Africans and children laid the groundwork for the emergence of racist science and the endurance of American white supremacy. Authors considered in this study include Thomas Jefferson, Phillis Wheatley, William Blake, Olaudah Equiano, Ann Taylor, Jesse Torrey, Frederick Douglass, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. |
| Keyword | childhood; Enlightenment; race; Romanticism; slavery; transatlanticism |
| Geographic subject (country) | USA |
| Coverage era | Eighteenth Century; Nineteenth Century |
| Language | English |
| Part of collection | University of Southern California dissertations and theses |
| Publisher (of the original version) | University of Southern California |
| Place of publication (of the original version) | Los Angeles, California |
| Publisher (of the digital version) | University of Southern California. Libraries |
| Provenance | Electronically uploaded by the author |
| Type | texts |
| Legacy record ID | usctheses-m2357 |
| Contributing entity | University of Southern California |
| Rights | Hodgson, Lucia |
| Repository name | Libraries, University of Southern California |
| Repository address | Los Angeles, California |
| Repository email | cisadmin@lib.usc.edu |
| Filename | etd-Hodgson-3080 |
| Archival file | uscthesesreloadpub_Volume26/etd-Hodgson-3080.pdf |
Description
| Title | Page 1 |
| Contributing entity | University of Southern California |
| Repository email | cisadmin@lib.usc.edu |
| Full text | NATURE, NURTURE, NATION: RACE AND CHILDHOOD IN TRANSATLANTIC AMERICAN DISCOURSES OF SLAVERY by Lucia Hodgson A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (ENGLISH) August 2009 Copyright 2009 Lucia Hodgson |
