Playful Visions: Optical Toys and the Emergence of Children’s Media Culture, by Meredith A. Bak

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Reviewed by: Playful Visions: Optical Toys and the Emergence of Children's Media Culture by Meredith A. Bak Monica Flegel (bio) Playful Visions: Optical Toys and the Emergence of Children's Media Culture, by Meredith A. Bak; pp. xi + 276. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2020, $30.00. My initial thought when beginning Playful Visions: Optical Toys and the Emergence of Children's Media Culture was one of professional and personal jealousy that the author had chosen a research topic that allowed her to play with vintage optical toys. Meredith A. Bak describes her process as follows: "In the basement of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, I twirled thaumatropes that reanimated nineteenth-century visual puns … At the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, I watched as a projecting praxinoscope's spinning drum sent a luminous scene onto the wall" (4–5). Lest other envious academics question just why some of our colleagues get to engage in more pleasurable research than others, I will say upfront that Bak's playful encounters with these optical toys are central to her efforts to understand their role in childhood education in the nineteenth century. What I appreciated most about this book, over and above the real pleasure I found in learning about the wide variety of optical technologies that were developed throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was Bak's careful attention to the "specificity of each of these devices" (22). In her thorough analysis of the materiality of the phenakistoscope, the kaleidoscope, the thaumatrope, and various other toys and [End Page 566] technologies, Bak highlights the importance of understanding just how each of these was absorbed into classed and raced narratives of visual competency in children's education. The overarching argument of Bak's monograph is that present-day "aspirations and anxieties" about the child as media consumer and spectator were shaped in the nineteenth century, and into the twentieth, through optical toys and their role in the home and the classroom (11). These toys were key to teaching children not just concepts such as persistence of vision, but also specific competencies that were linked to middle-class identity: "The power to visually surveil, discern, or scrutinize the social and material world was one strategy that members of the economically and socially unstable middle class used to fix their own positions" (13). For example, Bak devotes a chapter to the thaumatrope, which is a simple card on strings with images printed on either side. Twisting the strings while watching the quickly flipping card allows the viewer to see one image superimposed upon the other. Bak theorizes the connection between this toy's training of the persistence of vision and the skills required of the managerial class: seeing and interpreting sets those with visual competencies apart from the working classes, distinguishing between "mental and manual labor, helping to justify and reinforce a division of labor in those terms" (87). Throughout her text, Bak convincingly demonstrates how often these toys were linked to specific job training and skills, as well as to racialized, classed, and imperial ways of looking at the world. From her discussion of the depictions of "greenhorns" unable to distinguish between optical technologies and reality, to her analysis of the objectification of peoples and cultures via the stereoscope, Bak demonstrates how the training of the child's eye to master optical technologies was closely linked to social mobility aided by specific ways of seeing (84). While I appreciated the chapter organization of the book, which allowed for deep analysis of specific kinds of technologies, I did find that this made some of the overarching arguments a bit harder to follow through the text as a whole. Each chapter engaged with how various optical toys and teaching tools shaped the child viewer and participant toward classed forms of media spectatorship. However, the nature of that training was at times buried in the details of each technology. Additionally, there is some focus throughout on the agency of the user and their ability to "resist, negotiate, or challenge the visual logics that such toys sought to impart," but this is not fully developed in the book, and would perhaps require more thorough...