A Talk by Anna Mae Duane on Black Children's Reading in the 19c

On September 29 from 4:00-6:00 in Cathedral G24, the children's literature program hosts a talk by Anna Mae Duane, "Reading Black Children in the Nineteenth Century: A New Origin Story." Dr. Duane is the author of Suffering Childhood in Early America: Violence, Race, and the Making of the Child Victim (U of Georgia P, 2010) and editor of The Children's Table: Childhood Studies and the Humanities. She is currently working on two forthcoming edited volumes: Childhood Slavery Before and After Emancipation (Cambridge 2016) and, co-edited with Kate Capshaw Smith, Impossible Publics: African American Children's Literature before 1900 (U Minnesota, 2016). Her talk will focus on the work she's done for the latter volume and will deal centrally with a 1837 adaptation of Olaudah Equiano's 1789 narrative of his life as a slave by Quaker, abolitionist, and women’s rights activist Abigail Mott. Mott edited and adapted Equiano’s slave narrative (one of the first to be printed!) for black children studying at the progressive New York African Free School in the early nineteenth century. In addition to walking us through an argument about the text, Duane will share material from the archives of the school, namely schoolwork completed by African American students.