NEWSLETTER

Society for the History of Children and Youth

"At the Crossroads of Children's Studies and American Studies:

Intersections, Possibilities, Challenges"

American Studies Association Roundtable

In October, 2008, the American Studies Association Annual Meeting in Albuquerque, New Mexico featured a roundtable entitled, "At the Crossroads of Children's Studies and American Studies: Intersections, Possibilities, Challenges." Five of the panel's six presented papers are reprinted in the Newsletter.

Contents:

Roundtable Introduction……Carol Singley, Rutgers University-Camden

Adoption at the Crossroads……Carol Singley

Childhood Studies at the Crossroads: Childhood and Early American Studies

        Anna Mae Duane, University of Connecticut

Social History and the History of Childhood……Paula S. Fass,

        University of California, Berkeley

Childhood Studies and Feminist Critical Race Studies……Lucia Hodgson,

        University of Southern California

Scraps, Schoolbooks, and Homemade Books: Childhood Studies in the Archives

        Karen Sánchez-Eppler, Amherst College

Roundtable Panel Introduction

Carol Singley

It is now clear that Childhood Studies is no intellectual fashion trend, but rather a significant, burgeoning, interdisciplinary field. Like American Studies, it invites diverse methodologies and engages theoretical as well practical questions, with potential to shape not only perception but policy, with far-reaching implications for the child, the family, and the nation. In fall 2007, my institution, Rutgers University-Camden, formed the nation's first Ph.D. program in Childhood Studies. Students are eagerly enrolling, and faculty from diverse disciplines are experiencing invigorated teaching and research, leading some to speculate that Childhood Studies may well be to the twenty-first century what Women's Studies was to the twentieth century—that is, a transformative and central rather than supplementary line of inquiry.

That being the case, what is the relationship between Childhood Studies and American Studies? Both fields are interdisciplinary, offering diverse objects of study and various, sometimes controversial, methodologies. Both fields are concerned with a particular kind of identity and with the complexities associated with that identity. For example, some of us are Americans, but all of us were once children. This issue of identity raises central questions, including essentialist ones, about the definitions of childhood and its uses, just as the question about what constitutes a man, woman, or American generates a distinctive kind discourse. We may inquire of the nation as we do of the child: How are both defined in terms of chronological or developmental age; in terms of spatial location; in terms of psychological makeup, mythic pattern, or social position; or in terms of political rights and privileges that constitute citizenship? To address these and other topics, panelists were guided by the following questions:

• What is at the intersection of American Studies and Childhood Studies? (aims, methods, products)
• What are critical questions when we do work at this intersection?
• What does our work contribute to shaping the intersection of these two fields?
• Where does such work lead and why is it important?

Adoption at the Crossroads

Carol Singley

In my recent work at the intersection of American Studies and Childhood Studies, notions of "child" and "childhood" have been focal points for my investigation of literature and culture. Placing children and childhood at the center of inquiry has allowed me to interrogate assumed or overlooked aspects of the field: in particular, the role of genealogy and its counterpoint, adoption, in the construction of national identities and literatures. Since 1637, when John Winthrop wrote that "a family is a little commonwealth, and a commonwealth is a great family," the child has been enlisted in service of concepts of nation.1 The child, Caroline Levander argues in Cradle of Liberty, is "a benchmark of democratic process and its racial contours."2 The child is, as Karen Sánchez-Eppler explains in Dependent States, an imaginative construct for the making of home and market.3 Recent explorations of family and nation have similarly followed from the notion, articulated by Jay Fliegelman, Jerry Griswold, and others, that the literature of the nation develops as a child does, from a state of dependence, to rebellion, to independence.4 However, at the same time that there has been this attention to the link between literature and the American family and nationhood, the notion of kinship itself generally goes unexamined.

Kinship is tacitly accepted as biological kinship, while other ways of making a family, including those formed by adoption, go unnoticed. This is the case in spite of the fact that the United States is an adoptive nation, formed by separation from a birth parent country. The book I am completing now entitled Building a Nation, Building a Family: American Adoption, Literature and Culture, interrogates this child-family-nation metaphor in two ways. It notes that this trope is tacitly understood in terms of blood kinship and genealogical continuity. In response, it examines adoptive kinship to demonstrate how socially constructed models of family disseminate cultural values that differ from, and complement, biologically constructed ones.

This study has implications for American Studies and Childhood Studies. For example, in exploring the power of adoption to illuminate American narratives of personal and national identity, we note the extent to which theories of nationhood are themselves defined by genealogy. To be sure, twentieth-century theories of nationhood have developed from the traditional understanding of nation as something innate or inherited. As Benedict Anderson has shown, a nation is "an imagined political community" and a "style of continuity," discursively created and subject to discontinuities as well as continuities.5 However, to describe the rise of imagined communities, Anderson relies on the language of birth and development: nations, he writes, are conceived of as limited, sovereign, and involving community or "deep horizontal comradeship akin to those defined by blood."6 National loyalty, he goes on to say, invokes "the links between the dead and the yet unborn, the mystery of regeneration . . . a combined connectedness, fortuity, and fatality in a language of 'continuity.'"7

For Anderson and others, "continuity" and genealogy appear to be synonymous. Yet broken genealogies and adoptive bonds have functioned throughout the history of American literature to establish ideologies of national identity. Adoption is defined by severed lineage and the construction of new family organizations. Analogously, American national identities are equally defined in terms of severed ties to Great Britain and the construction of new forms of social and governmental organization. This analogy is not coincidental. Literary representations of adoption are tropes through which authors think about and resolve issues pertaining to American society and culture; their uses of adoption establish national ideologies. Since the seventeenth century, adoption has articulated on-going tension in American literature between notions of inherited and acquired identity. These tensions--between Old World and New World, between a sense of self shaped by the past and a sense of self open to the future--have driven national development and have circulated in discourse about American society since Alexis de Tocqueville first articulated them in his 1835 book, Democracy in America.8 The dominant attitude associated with adoption is ambivalence, which expresses a national celebration of fresh starts as well as a longing for lost origins. The terms child (lifetime), childhood (history), and generation (genealogy) converge to create a perception of nation that is born and develops with distinct inclinations and traits. 

Where does a specific focus on adoption lead and why might it matter? Few people think of adoption as an especially important aspect of the American family. The popular mind most likely thinks of adoption as a marginal way that unfortunate people have to construct a family. Why is it, then, that many of the major American literary landmarks have adoption at their center: Moby Dick closes with an image of stranded orphans being adopted by a father who has lost his biological children. Huckleberry Finn's flight down the Mississippi River is set in motion by the efforts of Widow Douglas to adopt him. Hester Prynne must fight off the oppressive governmental structure that insists that Pearl would be better raised by adoptive parents than by a single mother. The close-knit family of Little Women dissolves into an adoptive family unit established in Little Men. Severed biological families and elective families are defining features of American literature, in a way that is strikingly different in other national literatures. In fact, adoption has always been central to constructions of American literary and cultural identity.

Telling the story of adoption expands our notion of American literature and culture. Telling such a story also helps to address reality for an estimated 5-10% of the United States population whose lives are touched by adoption. Representations of broken and reformed genealogies define the American child, family, and nation in ways only recently noticed and partially understood. In 2000, Adam Pertman, director of the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute, declared the United States an "adoption nation," describing a process by which adoption is accelerating the transformation of the US into a more multicultural and multiethnic society.9 African Americans and Native Americans have long practiced kinship care and other flexible forms of family structures, making adoption an entry point for the examination of ethnic and racial diversity in American culture. Transnational adoptions similarly point to issues of colonialism, cosmopolitanism, and the global economy, and may help, as anthropologist Barbara Yngvesson suggests, "to unsettle the narrative of exclusive belongings, the notion of singular identity and a self that can be made whole."10

Adoption is one of many sites of inquiry found at the crossroads of American Studies and Childhood Studies that can help us address questions of identity, community, nation, and culture. Given its centrality, why has the trope of adoption been ignored? The answer lies in its undesirable meanings of not belonging, of being outside the norm, of lacking authenticity. It is precisely these features that alert us to the importance of bringing geneaology to the forefront, in the context of American Studies and Childhood Studies, so that inquiries into biological and adoptive kinship can help identify and challenge the dominant narratives that contribute to a sense of family and nation.

Endnotes

1. John Winthrop, "A Defense of an Order of Court," in The Puritans in America: A Narrative Anthology, ed. Alan Heimert and Andrew Delbanco, eds. (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1985), 164-68.

2. Caroline F. Levander, Cradle of Liberty: Race, the Child, and National Belonging from Thomas Jefferson to W.E.B. DuBois (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2006), 2.

3. Karen Sánchez-Eppler, Dependent States: The Child's Part in Nineteenth-Century American Culture (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2005).

4. Jay Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution Against Patriarchal Authority, 1750-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1982); Jerome Griswold, Audacious Kids: Coming of Age in America's Classic Children's Books (New York: Oxford UP, 1992).

5. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991), 6.

6. Anderson, 7 (my emphasis).

7. Anderson, 11.

8. Alexis De Tocqueville, Democracy in America (1835), trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Library of America, 2004).

9. Adam Pertman, Adoption Nation: How the Adoption Revolution is Transforming America (New York: Basic, 2000).

10. Barbara Yngvesson, "Going 'Home': Adoption, Loss of Bearings, and the Mythology of Roots," in Cultures of Transnational Adoption, ed. Toby Alice Volkman (Durham, NC: Duke UP), 25-48.

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