Afro-American Studies 202 - COLQ: TOPICS IN BLACK STUDIES

Topics course. Throughout the African diaspora in the Atlantic World, children were active participants in maintaining slave economies. They began working on plantations from as early as the age of 6. In the aftermath of Emancipation (both in the U.S.A. and Caribbean contexts) children's labor continued to play an important role in the economic stability of family life as well as in the hope for social and economic mobility. This course explores evolving definition of childhood by using the experiences of children belonging African American and Anglo Afro-Caribbean communities to examine how their lives were shaped by those around them, as well as by poverty, illness, race, gender and class. Students engage both secondary and primary sources in the thematic reconstruction of "childhood" in the African diaspora, from slavery to the First World War. (E)

Topic: Children in the Atlantic World.