Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights. RobinBernstein. New York: New York University Press, 2011.

Abstract

Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights. Robin Bernstein. New York: New York University Press, 2011.In discussions about controversial social and political issues - ranging from public entitlement programs to gay adoption to abortion - the potential impact on frequently comes up. Why are children invoked in such discourse, and what is the historical and cultural significance of this tendency? In Racial Innocence, Robin Bernstein sheds light on these questions by examining how the notion of childhood innocence has shaped - and been shaped by - conceptions of race. Trans-disciplinary in subject and transhistorical in scope, this fascinating book engages an impressive array of evidence, including graphic arts, ephemera, oral history, and material artifacts. Historiographically, it constitutes an important contribution to the scholarship on childhood (by Patricia Crain, Karen Sanchez-Eppler, and others) and the portrayal of race in literary, visual, and theatrical culture (by Daphne Brooks, Jo- Ann Morgan, and Harvey Young, for example). Theoretically and methodologically, Bernstein provides a new paradigm for understanding objects. Although the social significance of things has long been a topic of interest for Americanists working in material culture studies (e.g., David Jaffee, Jules David Prown, and Laurel Ulrich), Bernstein offers a new perspective by exploring not only what artifacts reveal but also what they demand. In other words, she contends that objects are fundamentally performative: they incite - or script - us to use them in highly specific ways.In the first chapter, Bernstein investigates formulations of childhood in American popular culture during the second half of the 1800s. She shows how representations of innocent white children, particularly Little Eva in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), came to symbolize innocence itself; how insensate black children, especially Topsy (another figure in Stowe's novel), stood in stark contrast to such images; and how activists and cultural producers mobilized these stock characters to deny and affirm the basic humanity of African Americans. Depictions of white children highlighted their vulnerability and goodness, whereas black children were imagined as comically impervious to pain. Bernstein follows this chapter with a development of her theory of scriptive things, arguing that objects generate practices in everyday life by inviting people to perform, in both the theatrical and functional sense. The scripts associated with dolls, such as the half-white/half-black topsy-turvy doll, are of special interest to her. …