Transnational Reproduction in Early America

As the scholarship of Caroline Levander, Karen Sánchez-Eppler and Jay Fleigleman has demonstrated, the figure of the child was central to constructions of early U.S. national identity. Today, one need look no further than the daily headlines to witness how stridently the boundaries of the American family—and the particular means through which that family can and should reproduce itself—are policed as a means of preserving the illusion of a quintessential, ahistorical American identity. As scholars Priscilla Wald, David Eng and others have illustrated, transnational contact and exchange through a host of venues—adoption, migration, pandemic outbreaks—both imaginatively and materially challenge the construction of the child as a figure that instantiates the American family as a bastion of white middle-class heteronormativity.

This panel seeks to further explore how transnational practices shape and challenge visions of family, reproduction and the figure of the child itself. Papers focusing on the colonial, early national, and antebellum periods are particularly welcome.

Please submit a 250 word abstract and c.v. to Anna Mae Duane at anna.duane@ uconn.edu by December 30, 2005.

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Received on Fri Dec 09 2005 - 15:18:25 EST