“Let Her White Progeny Offset Her Dark One”: The Child and the Racial Politics of Nation Making

Inner-City Children, Country Summers: Narrating American Childhood and the Geographies of Whiteness

“…Researchers have sought``to interrogate how [the child] comes to represent, and often codify, the prevailing ideologies of a given culture or historical period'' (Levander and Singley, 2003, page 3), including ideologies of whiteness (Dawkins, 2003;Ginsberg, 2003;Levander and Singley, 2003;Werrlein, 2004). The mutual constitution of whiteness and childhood is evident in recent analyses of 18th-century and 19th-century American narratives on slavery (Levander, 2004;Zwierlein, 2004) and British narratives concerning colonized subjects (Comer, 2005). Zwierlein (2004), for example, critically examines texts written by slaves and ex-slaves in pre-Civil War America.…”

The orphaned nation: Korea imagined as an overseas adopted child in Clon'sAbandoned Childand Park Kwang‐su'sBerlin Report

“…According to Caroline Levander's (2004) study of the building of the American nation, the image of a white AngloSaxon child was used to envision a racial and national identity without African-Americans in antebellum America, further underlining this connection between children and nationalism and how a child can be used to represent a nation. Returning to international adoption, Barbara Yngvesson (2003) writes about adoption from Chile to Sweden in the 1970s and 1980s, which made it possible for the adopted children to be entered in the Chilean civil register with their Swedish surnames.…”