Negotiating Childhood: French Colonialism and African Children in Senegal, 1848-1940 (Childhoods: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Children and Youth)

A groundbreaking study of the meaning of childhood in French colonial Senegal Negotiating Childhood explores how colonial child protection policies and African children’s responses to them produced new ways of defining, measuring, documenting, and experiencing childhood in the French colony of Senegal from 1848 to 1940.In this groundbreaking book, Kelly M. Duke Bryant takes the scholarship in new directions, offering to a literature dominated by studies of British colonies in the twentieth century a study of childhood in a French colony from the immediate post-emancipation period through the 1930s.This focus allows her to complicate the generally accepted timeline of child protection in colonial Africa and question other assumptions about children’s history on the continent. This deeply researched work uses a wide range of sources to examine children’s experiences in spaces where they encountered French discipline and surveillance, such as wardship courts, public streets, schools, juve