In 2023, Mahshid Mayar published the insightful article “‘Playes Print the Letter’: American Child(hoods) as Archival Present/ce” in the Journal for the History of Childhood and Youth. In it, she explores a much discussed topic within childhood studies: temporality. When you think of childhood, what comes to your mind? Perhaps you’re thinking of your own childhood that lies in the nostalgic past. Perhaps you’re thinking of what may become of a particular child in the future. Children’s presence is notoriously difficult to pin down especially for historians considering childhoods that are long gone. Mahshid’s article offers fascinating thoughts on how we may better grasp children’s archival presences.
Dear Mahshid, how would you sum up the argument of your article in two to three sentences?
In keeping with my long-standing interest (I wonder if it is an obsession, really) in absence, silence, and erasure, “Playes print the letter” does three things: it generates a categorization of the ways childhood is indeed a presence, serendipitous and often unintentional, in historical archives and the adult attitudes toward children and childhood (what I have termed in the article as “the double economies of endearment and endorsement”) that have ensured this presence; it then proceeds to examine a number of letters by American children to St. Nicholas Magazine, one of the most prestigious children’s periodicals since the latter quarter of the nineteenth century, arguing that the childhoods captured in these child-authored letters are “children’s own drafts of childhood”—brief personal accounts that demand historians to stop the impulse to wonder who these children became when they grew up; and, finally, it calls for a “rewriting of archive stories” around the figure of the child that subscribes to the idea that, aside from being a category of privilege (for many, but certainly not all, children), childhood is also a category of presence.
Why is the study of temporality particularly important when tracing childhood in the archives? How does the temporality of the researcher interact with the temporality of archival childhood?
Temporality is, as you have pointed out yourself, crucial in the study of childhood, in general, but also to the study of childhood and children in relation to archives: to begin, age is the decisive (if mercurial) factor in determining who is a child and who is not. What follows the debates on age are many and varied: what experiences and expressions belong exclusively to adults? What does it mean to die prematurely? What rights do children have? How are we to define “responsibility, “agency,” or political activism” when we think of children?
Second, in the archive-minded discussions I have made in “Playes print the letter,” the two adjectives that stem from temporality, i.e., temporary and temporal, both play a role: in most accounts and archive stories (a la Antoinette Burton (“Archive Fever, Archive Stories” 2005) that predominantly exclude childhood as it is/was crafted by children from the systems of labeling and boxing archive-worthy material in archives, childhood is temporary—a fleeting, hard-to-grasp moment along the allegedly linearly progressive vector called growing up. On the other hand, it is temporal in that it in fact is an idolized imaginary that adults hold onto as their past—as, indeed, everybody’s past. And these two perspectives both deeply shape what it means for parents, policy-makers, archivists, and historians (i.e., members of the exclusive club of adulthood) to enter archives, to stumble upon archival accounts of childhood, and to set to spin archive stories around them.
Third, and most illusively importantly, time and childhood matter in how archives and childhood (as children’s own present) do not quite agree in their temporalities. As I explain in the article, while archives are the product of endeavors to bring the past into the present, childhood, exactly because of its unique temporalities, is predominantly understood as alienated from the “present.” And this, I identify in the article as one of the factors that make the project of mapping archival work and childhood (except when it is made sense of as adult’s past) onto one another rather impossible.
How did you apply this thinking about presences of childhood to your own archival work, research, and your book Citizens & Rulers of the World?
Thanks for this question! It made me take a journey back to the early 2010s, when I spent months in various archives in the US in order to trace and then digitize the variety of sources that went into that project—a broken camera is the souvenir I took back with me from my first ever archival stay at the Library of Congress in 2011.
While collecting material for my book, I quickly realized that presence is not the first word I’d associate even with the relatively privileged, white, middle-class American children that my project was about. To get hold of the child was as difficult as it is was to trace accounts of childhood that were not by or for adults. And although I did not readily have a solution for this archival tendency, it made me even keener to let go of adults as often as the material I had access to allowed me and side with childhood as children’s own present. The result is a book with two chapters on childhood as an adult-crafted artefact and two other chapters that center childhood as a child-made, if illusive, draft of performance, negotiation, and mayhem.
In my own research, I encountered many sources by children, who died early and whose materials were likely preserved by their parents because they had passed. Based on your article, how do we, as researchers, grapple with this “archival presence”of children curated by adults (but not their own adult selves) through a nostalgic, past-focused lens that romanticizes both their dead child’s lost presence and their own childhood?
To answer this question, I can do little other than privileging the adult perspective because, well, that’s the only perspective we have access to after a child dies prematurely. For this archival presence is not of the child’s own present, but of a child for whose parents or relatives no presence is left and, in consequence, no future is imaginable. In fact, premature death of children turns childhood into an impossibility, exactly because it disrupts the received wisdom in the West that dictates a past-null-future temporality on childhood where growing up and out of childhood is the “norm,” caging it instead in a past that the living parents then have to carry with them into a future that won’t exist, where growing up is cancelled. And that is a truly tragic relationship one could have to time and that is why I have tried, as much as I can, to avoid “studying” prematurely dead children’s diaries or “analyzing” their portraits. It has always been in encountering such accounts of childhood that I find myself too uncomfortable wearing the scholar-cap. I therefore believe that this question should also be raised in circles outside historical childhood studies, such as history of emotions.
What do you envision as ways that political practices of archiving could take the presences of childhood better into account?
I wish I had a practical answer to this brilliant question, but I don’t. The cliché duo of “awareness and capacity building” seems key and a lot has been done on that front in the past few decades, but how would one go about it more systematically is far from simple. A lot depends on how we succeed in shifting existing views of childhood and, even then, we know how institutional budget limitations can counter views and the practices that could potentially follow them. What is more, there are sources that are lost forever and there is no way to replace or restore them and I wonder if much can be done in those instances. And, finally, archives are crafted on exclusionary regimes of power that will continue to privilege white, middle-class childhoods as more archive-worthy than those of non-white, working-class children and there is a lot of work to be done to counter such injustices, starting with a systematic search for childhoods lived and recorded by the under-privileged child—itself a rare apparition in archives other than when earmarked as failing, lacking, or outright disquieting.
I adore the 1890 letter by George H.E., which also led to the name of your article. From his southern sounding “Playes” to his cousin’s kitty playing the bangos, it is a delicious source. What is one other source of a child’s “archival presence” that gave you joy in the process of writing your book?
I agree! I had a couple other titles in mind for the article, but I couldn’t resist George’s closing line as its most fitting title. It is delicious and more: it is the perfect example of a source that allows for an archive story to be spun around it about, e.g., literacy and penmanship, anxiety in performing childhood, place of memory from a young age, and so on—in other words, about childhood as a child’s own present. And I came across many such letters and geography games in my own work, not all of which ended up in the chapters and essays I have written on American childhoods. One amazing letter that I have also analyzed in the final chapter of Citizens and Rulers of the World was penned by Elizabeth Haviland Brown and appeared in St. Nicholas in October 1898. Young Elizabeth writes in her letter about a comical yet grave misunderstanding that had got her brother into a fight with a German boy during their year-long stay in Weimar, Germany. According to the 14-year-old writer, her younger brother had misunderstood a sentence by the German boy as an insult on US troops in the Philippines and beaten the boy up before realizing that the German sentence—“Amerika hat keinen Verlust”—was in fact a rather disinterested observation by the boy about US army’s advances in the scandalous “Battle of Manila.” The family, Elizabeth reported, had “had a good laugh about it” later. How cruel and bizarre is that?!
To end on a personal note, we’d like to ask you a few of your favorite things…
a. Favorite way of managing notes and/or citations?
I hate the confessional mode in answering interview questions, but I can’t escape it: I do citations mostly manually esp. because, unlike when I wrote my first book in historical childhood studies and following the Chicago Manual of Style, I am now working on a project that explores the interdigitations of the archival and the poetic and is, thus, a book that calls for citations in the MLA Style. It is chaos in my head and also chaos in my notes. But I seem to manage—mostly!
b. Best book in the history of childhood and youth you’ve read in the past year (does not have to be something that was also published in the last year)?
This is particularly tough to answer as the field has been witness to a plethora of groundbreaking scholarship since well before I started my work on childhood. But if I am to pick, I would say that I continue to enjoy the works of the three leading figures in attending to whose scholarship I became a historian of childhood, namely Karen Sanchez-Eppler, Robin Bernstein, and Patricia Crain. Crain’s Reading Children (2016) used to haunt me, in terms both of its analytical rigor and the way Crain claims academic English as a means to discuss such delicate, fleeting matters as stains on the pages of a children’s book.
c. Favorite childhood game or toy?
Perhaps the favorite toy from my childhood is a hungry hippo game board that we had and that I used to adore—the pleasure of always beating my brother at it, when he used to beat me at basically every other game in the history of games! Before long, though, I discovered the pleasures of writing and reading poetry and that fascinated me more than any game or toy ever could.
d. Best piece of advice you got as a child?
I guess the most cherished piece of advice I got was from the teacher of my then favorite subject, geography, when I was in the sixth or seventh grade: do not waste anything in this life, she used to say. It has stayed with me ever since.
e. And in keeping with the theme of the piece, how have you gone about archiving your own childhood?
To claim that I had any thoughts on the question of archive when I was a child is an exaggeration, of course. But I did write a lot—at some point in high school, I kept three diaries at the same time, in each of which I practiced a different “voice”—and I kept them in cardboard boxes that sit right now on my personal library at home. The peak of my archive-mindedness was when I entered college and I decided that in order for me to be able to keep what I had written as a teenager I simply had to get rid of so much of what I then thought were “cringe pieces”—too sappy for a serious writer that I still hoped I would eventually become.
Mahshid Mayar (she/her) is an assistant professor of American Studies at the University of Innsbruck, Austria. Mahshid’s first book, Citizens and Rulers of the World: The American Child and the Cartographic Pedagogies of Empire (University of North Carolina Press, 2022), was awarded the Shelley Fisher Fishkin Prize for Original Research in Transnational American Studies. She is currently working on W( )oles and ( )holes: Politically Engaged Erasure Poetry in Twenty-First-Century United States, a second-book project that interrogates the ways the political pervades the poetic and the poetic manifests the political in 21C U.S. poetry.
