Who Writes for Black Children? African American Children's Literature before 1900

Abstract

Who Writes for Black Children? is a compelling collection of scholarly essays and primary material that will be valuable to anyone interested in the history of childhood—or in book history, reading and reception history, materiality, ephemera, or interpretation. Examining poetry, fiction, biography, illustrations, periodicals, friendship albums, pamphlets, marginalia, and more, the collection analyzes the goals and rhetorical strategies of diverse genres published for African American children and (perhaps) read by them. Beyond offering a wealth of detail about the production and reception of numerous texts, Who Writes for Black Children? provides sophisticated approaches to thorny problems of evidence and conceptualization. Some essays reconstruct the target audience of a poem or story; others attempt to establish who read it, and how. Engaging influential accounts of childhood, the book complicates both Anna Mae Duane's emphasis on the image of the vulnerable black child confined to a future of victimization and Robin Bernstein's claim that African American children were denied the experience of innocence—a concept that became intimately bound up with whiteness in the course of the nineteenth century. The volume argues that neglected antebellum texts challenged such widely circulating assumptions about black children by attempting to inspire young readers to believe in their own capacity—for virtue, literacy, agency, citizenship, and political action.