[ Interarea Sessions, Table of Contents ]
[ Panels by World Area Main Menu ]
[ View the Timetable of Panels ]
Orphans in Asia, the Making of Citizens and Subjects in India, China and Vietnam in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries
Organizer: Norman D. Apter, University of California, Los Angeles
Chair: Christina E. Firpo, California Polytechnic State University
Discussants: M. Colette Plum, Beijing Center for Chinese Studies; Diana E. Wright, Western Washington University
Orphans in India, China and Vietnam were the weakest, most vulnerable members of society. They were unique from other children in their lack of family, the primary unit of socialization and reproduction of nation. As such, orphans were subject to influences of their institutional environment. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, these three countries were the subjects of foreign aggression and orphans were commonly used as a metaphor for the national situation. As the wards of state, orphans became the site in which the colonial ideology or nationalist ideas were reproduced. These three papers investigate themes of nationalism and colonialism that appeared in the discourse on orphan welfare. Norm Apter investigates the practices and conceptual underpinnings of child relief work in wartime China (1937-1945). He contends that Chinese elites viewed the rehabilitation of the displaced and dispossessed child as tantamount to the revitalization of the nation as a whole. Christina Firpo examines the Depression-era Indochina colonial project to institutionalize orphaned children and the related Vietnamese feminist discourse on orphan care. She argues that, in the 1930s, orphan children became the site of contest between the colonial project and the nationalist movement. Satadru Sen explores the category of “orphan” in the colonial project in India, 1857-1930. He argues that the category of “orphan” was a site for the construction of a scientific and progressive colonialism, and for articulations of the need for colonial rule.
Making Citizens out of Orphans, Child Refugees, and Street Urchins: the Project of Child Welfare in Wartime China (1937 -1945)
Norman D. Apter, University of California, Los Angeles
This paper explores the endeavor to transform rootless children in wartime China (1937 -1945) into healthy and productive citizens. Amid catastrophic economic and social dislocation, the forsaken or abandoned child emerged as a symbol of hope for the construction of a vigorous nation and the creation of a productive and well ordered society. The state and civic associations responded jointly to the flood of displaced youths by establishing supra-regional networks of child welfare homes. On one level, this study draws on documents produced by these institutions to reconstruct the educational curriculum, vocational training, moral instruction and medical services rendered to the sheltered child. An examination of these practices sheds light on the ways in which these organizations sought to mold child refugees, waifs, and street urchins into politically conscious, productive members of society. On another level, this paper investigates the conceptual underpinnings of the movement. Political elites and social activists alike claimed the enterprise of child welfare to be an essential component of the twin tasks of “nation building” and “resisting the Japanese.” Essays and articles that appeared in newspapers and women’s journals of the time are employed to show how Chinese elites viewed the vulnerable child and how the act of empowering her was tantamount to constructing a robust nation. In sum, the wandering child epitomized the uprooted nation, and this made the task of revitalizing the former all the more pressing in the minds of contemporary social and political leaders.
Working Mothers and Orphaned Children: The Depression Era Poverty Relief Program in Colonial Vietnam
Christina E. Firpo, California Polytechnic State University
The privations of the Great Depression resulted in large numbers of abandoned and orphaned Vietnamese children. As part of a larger poverty relief program, the French colonial government worked with private organizations and businesses to develop a childcare program. Through the 1930s, large numbers of impoverished Vietnamese children were institutionalized in orphanages, day cares, kindergartens and nurseries. Institutional childcare, a foreign phenomenon to Vietnam at this point, was largely embraced by Vietnamese feminists. This paper examines the colonial government and Vietnamese feminists’ interests in orphan and institutional childcare. The colonial orphan and childcare care program developed out of a government plan to augment the colony’s low-wage workforce by recruiting female laborers and ensuring the next generation of healthy workers. In order to free women for labor out side of the home, their children were placed in institutions. These institutions also served to ensure the health of orphans and teach them to be loyal to the colonial government. According to this plan, the orphans would grow up to become the colony’s future citizen-producers. As the Vietnamese feminist movement gradually joined the anti-colonial movement, the rhetoric on orphan care began to change. The feminist media increasingly wrote about children as potential political beings and cited Vietnamese-run orphanage institutions as an essential influence on children’s political development. By the mid-1930s orphan children became a site of contest between the colonial project and the nationalist movement.
A Colony of Orphans: India, 1857-1930
Satadru Sen, Queens College, City University of New York
Orphanages were among the first ‘children’s institutions’ in British India. These institutions appeared in various guises from the mid-nineteenth century onwards: some housed the children of dead soldiers, some the children of famine victims, others the offspring of the ‘savage’ and the ‘criminal.’ The segregated orphans were white as well as black, English as well as Irish and Eurasian, Indian as well as African. Nearly all were male. The identities of the guardians also varied widely: while some were the officers of the state, others were missionaries or Indians with their own agendas. Nearly all were male, although women proved difficult to exclude altogether. This paper examines the category of the ‘orphan’ as an highly contrived ideological site on which the colonial state, its partners and its competitors sought to enact their rituals of colonization. The ‘orphan’ in British India was not so much a child that had lost its parents as an appropriation of authority by adults engaged in delineating the boundaries of paternalist and interventionist government, and who were eager to establish their own credentials as experts on race, childhood, normalcy and deviance. Orphans thus generated rewarding opportunities for the construction of a scientific and progressive colonialism, and for articulations of the need for colonial rule.