Jul 21, 2026

Negotiating Childhood

French Colonialism and African Children in Senegal, 1848-1940

Kelly M. Duke Bryant

Hosted by Elisa Prosperetti

Buy Book

Summary

Kelly M. Duke Bryant’s Negotiating Childhood: French Colonialism and African Children in Senegal, 1848-1940 (U Mass Press, 2026)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, 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.

The author, Kelly M. Duke Bryant, is an Associate Professor of History at Rowan University and the current President of the French Colonial Historical Society.

The host, Elisa Prosperetti, is an Assistant Professor of African and global history at NIE/NTU in Singapore. She is the author of An Anticolonial Development: Race, Schooling, and Emancipation in Twentieth-Century West Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2026).

Comments

Your Host

Elisa Prosperetti

Elisa Prosperetti is an Assistant Professor (History) at the National Institute of Education in Singapore. Her first book, An Anticolonial Development: Race, Schooling, and Emancipation in Twentieth-Century West Africa, will be published by Cambridge University Press in May 2026.

View Profile