Who Writes for Black Children? African American Children's Literature before 1900 ed. by Katharine Capshaw and Anna Mae Duane

Abstract

Reviewed by: Who Writes for Black Children? African American Children's Literature before 1900 ed. by Katharine Capshaw and Anna Mae Duane Crystal Lynn Webster Who Writes for Black Children? African American Children's Literature before 1900. Edited by Katharine Capshaw and Anna Mae Duane. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2017. xvi + 384 pp. Cloth $120, paper $30. The burgeoning attention paid to African American children in the field of childhood studies has enriched critical approaches to both African American history and literature. This emerging focus has been marked by formal symposia, informal academic conversations, and new publications on topics in black childhood, a trend that represents a significant scholarly moment in childhood studies. Who Writes for Black Children? capitalizes upon this momentum and provides a valuable reflection on and contribution to each of these spaces of scholarly inquiry. The volume contains twelve essays and is divided into five sections. The final section offers a rich collection of literature for African American children authored and edited by both white and black writers. The twelve essays as a whole explore the formation of African American children's literature and readership by deploying new and innovative analytical lenses. In doing so, the collection produces both commentary on, and reproduction of, nineteenth-century literature that is an essential resource for scholars and students of African American and children's literature. Editors Katharine Capshaw and Anna Mae Duane pose generative inquiries in their introduction to the collection by identifying methodological entanglements inherent within locating nineteenth-century black child-readers and literature. These include social trends that dictated who could claim the category of "child" and infantilized African Americans. Capshaw and Duane argue that uncovering black literature and child-readers destabilizes conventional interpretations of childhood, authorship, and audience, a task the contributors enthusiastically embrace. As such, their definition of African American children's literature is intentionally [End Page 468] capacious, including literature and writings authored by adults and children, African Americans and whites, and texts that African American children may or may not have directly engaged. The first section uncovers black child-readers through an engagement of African American poets whose contributions to the field of African American children's literature have gone largely unrecognized, including Lucy Skipwith, Jupiter Hammon, and Frances Harper. Each of these essays employs "conjuring," a groundbreaking conceptual framework introduced by Angela Sorby, as a way to identify eighteenth- and nineteenth-century authors' attention to black child-readers. In the process of conjuring real and imagined black children, Sorby aptly argues these authors "make literate agency possible" (6). Conjuring, then, becomes an especially useful framework to locate both black readership and historical black children. The volume's second section on schooling practices and instructional texts provides salient archival representations of both of these topics, with especially illuminating examples of African American children's voices in the historical archive. Mary Niall Mitchell's exploration of the letters written by black children who attended New Orleans's Couvent School powerfully demonstrates the political agency of nineteenth-century African American children in ways that disrupt conventional narratives of children, African Americans, and emergent black political thought. In part 3, the contributors examine literature authored mainly by whites that directly addressed and represented African American children. As such, each of these essays challenges the exclusion of such texts from the genre of African American children's literature, as well as the assumptions of presumed readers of white texts and their significance for African American children. Here, Brigitte Fielder provides a model for examining white-authored children's literature by analyzing African American children's interpretations of nineteenth-century narratives of human-animal relations, thereby challenging readings of this literature as a reproduction of racist values. The bibliographic essays of the fourth section summarize sites of African American children's literature and provide an overview of works published in the Christian Recorder. The final section includes primary sources—poems, essays, and excerpts—many of which are addressed by the contributors. This collection of texts lays the groundwork for the development of a distinct genre of African American children's literature. As is stated in the volume's introduction, most of the essays are concerned with...