This panel turns toward new analytical, historiographical, and cultural directions in Age Studies by focusing on the intersections between race, ethnicity, and the life cycle. Study on the stages of the human life cycle is often concerned with various theoretical frameworks of development, which range from the psychoanalytic to the evolutionary, the historical to the political. Although such frameworks should draw our attention to the subject of racial formation, Age Studies has rarely been a site for an examination of western modernity’s global influence and the afterlife of its regimes of domination, with slavery and colonialism key among them. As a result of this under-examination, there remains a missing feedback loop between Age Studies and fields such as Black Studies, and Ethnic Studies, and Postcolonial Studies, which all address the historical circumstances and the ongoing impact of racial formation. The goal of this panel discussion is to bring together scholars from across fields whose work addresses how the historical afterlives of slavery and colonialism reveal new dimensions of the age and life cycle.

Nathaniel Windon’s “Shelter from the Storm: Little Huts and Old Age” considers an archive of little huts allocated to older, enslaved people as they appear in the writings of Mary Prince, Moses Roper, and Harriet Jacobs. It draws on theories of what Hortense Spillers names “insurgent grounds” as well as feminist theories of caretaking. Ultimately, by providing refuge from a capitalist logic that invariably tied together time and labor, little huts decoupled age and economy. They broke the life cycle, insofar as the “life cycle” is an arc of appreciating value in youth and depreciating value in old age. While “little huts” evidenced the hypocrisy of paternalism, the unrelenting capitalist logic of slavery, as well as what Frederick Douglass calls the “infernal character of slavery,” they also served as shelters where enslaved people practiced forms of caretaking that rejected the idea that the elderly were less valuable because of their diminished capacity for work.

Jacob Jewusiak’s “Colonialism and the Paces of Race,” focuses on a pervasive stereotype in nineteenth and twentieth-century literature that links the speed of an individual’s development to race, climate, and nationality. In texts such as George Bernard Shaw’s Back to Methuselah (1922)—where a race of preternaturally long-lived people found a colony that takes over the world—longevity becomes a signifier for an emerging global hierarchy based on the duration of life rather than quantity of population. In India, Jewusiak argues, this tension takes the idiomatic form of untouchability: texts such as Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable (1935) and B. R. Ambedkar’s Annihilation of Caste (1936) link the struggle for independence to the way naturalized caste distinctions inhibit the development of the individual over time.

Susan Bussey’s “Age and Race” begins from the premise that the first half of the 20^th century in American Literature offers an enormous expansion of characters, types, and depictions in fiction and poetry: the poor, the criminal, the alienated, the cognitively different. Within that panoply, a recurrent character type is the African American elder, a black person of uncertain but significant age who provides longevity of perspective to the narrative. Bussey’s paper will examine some of these female characters: Nanny Crawford in Their Eyes Were Watching God, Mary in Invisible Man, Dilsey in The Sound and the Fury, exploring how the representation of age is marked by the race of the character—or by the race of the author.

Acting as respondent to the panel, Habiba Ibrahim will reflect on how the essays intervene in the study of how meanings attached to age and aging diverge between colonies and metropoles; the cultural practices of Black children during any historical period; and accounts of how racial and ethnic communities experience old age. This panel will set the stage for the next steps of Age Studies and its disciplinary evolution.