Black Dolls Research Articles

Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights by Robin Bernstein (review)

Reviewed by: Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights by Robin Bernstein Michelle H. Martin (bio) Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights. By Robin Bernstein. New York: New York University Press, 2011. Robin Bernstein's Racial Innocence offers an impressively rich and thorough analysis of late nineteenth- to mid-twentieth-century materials related to childhood, illustrating the means through which black children were systematically excluded from being categorized as innocent. Relying on personal accounts, archival records, historical documents, toys, and other articles with which children played, she then illustrates how, through their own forms of play and performance, black children effectively resisted this systematic negative scripting and assaults upon their childhood and humanity. Most noteworthy is the way that Bernstein pieces together layer upon layer of evidence from multiple sources—written documents, accounts of performances, musical scores, sales records from toy companies, and documented interviews with descendants of slaves—to make a convincing argument that runs counter to how Americans have historically thought about black children and their play. Bernstein begins the first chapter, "Tender Angels, Insensate Pickaninnies," by juxtaposing a documentary photograph of a young white female cotton picker standing in a cotton field with an illustrated advertisement for Cottolene, a lard substitute, featuring a black child. The photograph, taken by Lewis Hine, who used his camera to fight against child labor in the early decades of the twentieth century, evokes the viewer's empathy and clearly shows fieldwork as an inappropriate burden for a preadolescent white girl. The advertisement for Cottolene, on the other hand, naturalizes the black child's embrace of a baby-shaped mound of cotton and "sells black child's labor as worthy of being embraced rather than burdensome" (33). Through illustrations from popular culture and printed artifacts, Bernstein effectively articulates the bifurcation of childhood that occurred in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; though these representations were by no means monolithic, the white child generally was depicted as innocent while the black child character was "increasingly and overwhelming evacuated of innocence" and ultimately "redefined as a nonchild—a pickaninny" (34). A defining characteristic in the portrayal of the pickaninny was the child's inability to feel pain, and "[a]t stake in this split was fitness for citizenship and inclusion in the category of the child and, ultimately, the human" (36). [End Page 96] Central to Bernstein's argument is the figure of Topsy in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin—a novel whose influence spanned many decades following its publication. In chapter two, "Scriptive Things," Bernstein uses the relationship between Eva and Topsy in Stowe's novel to demonstrate how slavery could harden otherwise sensitive individuals—like this slave child—but how humane treatment could reverse this hardening process. Uncle Tom's Cabin remains a touchstone and point of reference throughout Racial Innocence, beginning with Stowe's book but proceeding into a lengthy discussion of its cultural impact, manifested in countless stage plays, toys, figurines, handkerchiefs, and other artifacts of popular culture for both children and adults which kept the story in the public imagination long after the book's publication. Bernstein also delineates how apologists for slavery made subtle shifts in the story as they reinterpreted and refashioned it in numerous forms, turning Stowe's antislavery message and sentimentalism "topsy-turvy" (50), thereby changing the figure of Topsy from a sympathetic character who, with Christian love, human tenderness, and salvation, could become the good person Eva wants her to be, into an insensate, humorous pickaninny who invites abuse because she, like the black child characters in E. W. Kemble's A Coon Alphabet, cannot feel pain or be damaged by violence. This characteristic of Topsy later led to the manufacturing of black dolls whose very construction invited abuse and rough play. In Bernstein's third chapter, "Everyone Is Impressed: Slavery as a Tender Embrace from Uncle Tom's to Uncle Remus's Cabin," she reads children's dolls and toys as "scriptive things" that issued a set of prompts to children who played with them (71). In other words, although it is difficult to say with any certainty what children actually did...

Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights by Robin Bernstein

Reviewed by: Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights by Robin Bernstein Jayna Brown (bio) Bernstein, Robin. Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights. New York: New York UP, 2011. Through an amazing curation of materials carefully and painstakingly gleaned from a number of archives, including collections at the American Antiquarian Society and the Harvard Theatre Collection, Robin Bernstein shows how the innocence of white childhood was imagined and enacted in relation to fictional versions of the black child, rendered in advertisements, collectibles, children’s books and toys, and especially dolls, from the antebellum era into the 1910s. Dolls and toys are “scriptive things,” Bernstein argues, “item[s] of material culture that prompt meaningful bodily behaviors” (Bernstein 8, 71). Violence against African Americans is the key “inscription” Bernstein traces through the performed relationships white children have with their black dolls. Child’s play with black effigies was most often scripted for acts of degradation and cruelty, and is crucial to understanding how racist violence against African Americans was naturalized. At the center of her argument is white girlhood, as embodied in the dyad Topsy and Little Eva from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin and its aftermath in popular culture. [End Page 482] This dyad is embodied powerfully in the topsy-turvy doll, that inverts into either Eva or Topsy depending on which way you turn the skirts. As opposed to earlier versions of the child, as born into original sin until saved, the blessed and “tender angel” Eva embodies the shift to the idea of the child as born innocent and pure. Eva is an American trope, made possible through her performance of generous intimacy with the insensate picaninny Topsy. Not only childhood but slavery is made innocent through Eva’s touch, as Bernstein shows in the pictorial relationship between Eva and Uncle Tom found in illustrations to Stowe’s novel. A few years ago I was made cognizant of the durable, widespread ubiquity of the trope of Topsy and Little Eva. In an Ikea store in Southern California with my newlywed friend (a black woman) and her white mother-in-law, my friend left us alone for a moment. When she returned, her mother-in-law exclaimed, “Here comes Topsy now!” Tears and apologies ensued, but I will never forget how easy it was for the older woman to find that reference, lodged, as she told us, in memories from her girlhood in North Carolina. Bernstein’s book is an excellent study of material culture, carefully reading the politics of the manufacture of these toys in their historical context. For instance, Bernstein explains how soft dolls were developed not only for cuddling but to withstand abuse, which she argues is profoundly racialized and gendered. Many dolls in Bernstein’s study accompany storybooks, such as the Golliwog dolls, based on characters invented by Florence Upton, and Raggedy Ann dolls, which John Gruelle designed to accompany his children’s books. Bernstein explains how these dolls have deep roots in minstrelsy. Bernstein’s elucidation of the cruelty involved in the creation of toys and the narratives of storybooks, that supposedly represent the innocence of childhood, is arresting. But it is how white children played with the dolls I find most disturbing in the book. Out of the many examples of white girls and their interaction with their black dolls and figurines, a few will continue to haunt me. Bernstein relates the case of Frances Hodgson Burnett, who in her girlhood memoir The One I Knew Best of All: A Memory of the Mind of a Child reminisces about her relationship with a particular black doll, made of a hard rubber called “gutta percha,” that she named Topsy. According to Bernstein, the hard bodied material of the doll “script[ed] broadly violent play,” enacting the fantasy of black imperviousness to pain (Bernstein 71). In one instance, Burnett renamed the doll Uncle Tom and acted as the slave master Simon Legree, binding the doll to a candelabra and beating it, while “furious with insensate rage” (Bernstein 69). Bernstein explains, “Burnett’s act was one of many that installed childhood innocence as a powerful component...

Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights by Robin Bernstein (review)

Reviewed by: Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights by Robin Bernstein Samantha Christensen Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights. Robin Bernstein. New York: New York UP, 2011. 307 pp. In Racial Innocence, Robin Bernstein engages in a discursive commentary on race, childhood, and innocence in American texts emerging from the antebellum period (the period prior to the Civil War). Bringing slave narratives and theatrical adaptations into discussion with Stowe’s seminal text Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Bernstein explores the racism and Eurocentric values implicit in nineteenth-century American understandings of childhood innocence. She recognizes that Stowe’s influential work, often linked to the spark that ignited the American Civil War, was more than a work of literature: it carried with it a material culture that cut through class, gender, and racial boundaries. Bernstein refers to Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a repertoire, as it existed as prose, parlor performance, visual art, and in other cultural forms. Throughout Racial Innocence, she offers close readings of texts and other material, particularly white and black dolls, and unpacks the implications of white supremacy implicit in the romanticized notion of the African American as childlike. Bernstein introduces the first chapter with a comprehensive analysis of the book’s cover image, a nineteenth-century advertisement for Cottolene (a brand of cooking fat), by comparing the image of the African American child to a similar advertisement for the same product depicting a young white girl. Bernstein recognizes that understandings of [End Page 99] childhood shifted in the nineteenth-century, and (white) children were no longer viewed as small adults, but rather as fragile and innocent beings. The author argues, however, that nineteenth-century cultural material portrayed black children as “pickaninnies”: wild, gluttonous, and immoral creatures who were unable to feel pain or respond emotionally to actions or events. The ability to feel pain was a key component of childhood innocence, and because the pickaninny was thought to be immune to pain, the notion of childhood innocence did not transmit to the black child. Bernstein supports this argument with contrasting analyses of the violence which was encouraged toward black rubber dolls and the nurturing attitudes promoted through white porcelain dolls. She also reads the recurring touches shared between Eva, the pure and innocent white child in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and Topsy, the wild and misbehaving black slave-child. The touch is a key factor in the adoption of childhood innocence on Topsy’s part, and Bernstein offers an insightful discourse on the transfer of innocence in shared touches between white slaveholders and black slaves. She also begins to explore the discourse of racial innocence at work in the popular Topsy-Turvy doll of the nineteenth century, which she carries into the following chapter. In the second chapter, Bernstein looks more closely at the Topsy-Turvy doll—a popular double-ended children’s toy depicting Eva and Topsy fused at the waist and separated by a shared skirt. Highly popular all over antebellum America, the Topsy-Turvy doll helped the repertoire of Uncle Tom’s Cabin come to life, and Bernstein explores the problematic relationship between the widely loved doll and the racial consciousnesses of white and black children alike. She suggests that the black and white characters convey images of the mixed-race child and subtly comment on issues of rape and miscegeny in slave-holding America. Bernstein notes that these dolls were often sewn by slave women in the domestic sphere, and the social commentary attached to these bi-racial, “crotchless” dolls “was not only intellectually brilliant but also angry and bitterly witty” (89). Bernstein offers a deeply insightful and innovative analysis of the well-known Topsy-Turvy doll, and foregrounds an exploration of issues of miscegeny, rape, and slave women’s experiences sewn into this popularly well-loved toy. In the third chapter, entitled “Everyone is Impressed: Slavery as a Tender Embrace from Uncle Tom’s to Uncle Remus’s Cabin,” Bernstein suggests that nineteenth-century social understandings of childhood and its inextricable link to innocence masks a sexual relationship between Eva and Uncle Tom. She contends that, had Eva been an adult character in the...

Racialized Things

Racialized Things Sarah E. Chinn (bio) Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights. By Robin Bernstein. New York: New York University Press, 2011. 318 pages. $75 (cloth). $24 (paper). Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness. By Nicole R. Fleetwood. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. 296pages. $75(cloth). $25(paper). Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the Nineteenth Century. By Kyla Wazana Tompkins. New York: New York University Press, 2012. 288pages. $75(cloth) $24(paper). Consider the topsy-turvy doll. An invention of enslaved women in the nineteenth century, the doll is a potent image of the inextricability of American whiteness from its black counterpart, and vice versa. If you have never seen one, it is a fascinating object: the doll is a fusion of two half-dolls, one black and one white. What would normally be the legs and feet of one doll is the torso and head of the other. As one turns the doll upside down, the skirt attached to its waist flips over, revealing the face and body of the other doll. It is a short commute from playing with a white doll to playing with a black doll: a quick flip, and the doll’s racial other emerges. The topsy-turvy doll can never fully show both its black and white ends: for one to be visible, the other must be hidden beneath the doll’s skirts. The black and white dolls are joined at their nonexistent crotches, which instead become the beginning of the other doll. Each doll, then, is in a way giving birth to even as it smothers the other; each doll emerges from the nonexistent genitals of the other.1 As Robin Bernstein shows in her eye-opening book Racial Innocence, the topsy-turvy doll is one of the most illuminating and poignant enactments of segregation we have. Black and white figures are joined literally at the hip but never genuinely interact. While each becomes visible through the same mechanisms, the terms in which that visibility occurs are very different: the [End Page 873] white doll is more often than not identified as “Eva,” the innocent martyred child hero of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, while the black doll, as its name suggests, is named after Topsy, the enslaved child whose soul Eva sets out to save. On occasion, the black doll is a mammy figure, the caring subordinate to the white girl to whom she is set in anatomical opposition. As in the segregated United States, black and white girls and women occupy the same space but under terms of profound inequality. To say that the topsy-turvy doll naturalizes racial difference is not quite accurate. No one would argue that dolls are products of nature, after all. Rather, the doll filters understandings of how race operates through an everyday object, and, most importantly for Bernstein’s purposes, a product designed for and played with by children. All three books under consideration here are fascinated by what we might call racialized things: things that bear, communicate, and reproduce regimes of racialization even as that is not their sole or even primary purpose.2 They all ask, in different (and differently overlapping ways) the question posed by Nicole R. Fleetwood in Troubling Vision: how does a certain kind of racial identity—which in Fleetwood’s work is blackness, in Bernstein’s is blackness and/or whiteness, and in Kyla Wazana Tompkins’s is blackness, whiteness, and Chineseness, among other identities— “get attached to bodies, goods, ideas, and aesthetic practices,” and how do those practices get disseminated on various registers in popular culture (20)? Fleetwood, Bernstein, and Tompkins are all part of a new generation of scholars in American and African American studies. Heirs to the anti-essentialism of the 1990s and the efflorescence of affect theory in the twenty-first century, they see blackness as both fungible and deeply rooted in lived experience. They are as indebted to Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s formulation of racial formation as they are to queer theories of performativity and the emotionally resonant while theoretically sophisticated work of current scholars such as Robert Reid-Pharr, Sara Ahmed, and Heather Love.3 This olio...

Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights (review)

Reviewed by: Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights Kathryn Bond Stockton Robin Bernstein. Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights. New York: New York University Press, 2011. Pp. 308, illustrated. $75.00 (Hb); $24.00 (Pb). So much depends upon dolls in pain. Do they feel their beatings at the hands of children? What’s at stake in thinking a doll can feel distress? This is a drama. The liquid idea or crystallized tactility of such a possible sensation for a doll, for a black doll – the sense that it could recoil, with tenderness or sorrow, if you were to hit it – tells us volumes about the race of childhood, from the time of slavery up to Civil Rights. Childhood, which en-thrones innocence, which shapes race (and rights that start in childhood), hangs upon pain – doll pain, in part. Expertly, persuasively, and often brilliantly, Bernstein tells us why. With her inventiveness, thoroughness, and carefulness always in evidence, always remarkably impressive and required, always surfacing in apt formulations, she makes her focus on dolls indispensable to grasping racial cruelty in the nineteenth century and even beyond. That is to say, in this conspicuously well-researched study, Bernstein surprises us with fractures that we know. Pain as a possible, meaningful sensation – a feeling we attribute to others, even dolls – marks specific borders, especially between enslaved and free, but also between childhood innocence and something like juvenile inuredness to hurt. Who feels suffering and so needs shielding from it? Who, in other words, has racial innocence, a sensitivity to possible harm? Children rehearse these relations with their dolls. And adults rehearse them by watching children play – and by watching dramas or reading certain novels that induce beliefs surrounding human pain. Such beliefs tell us whether slavery as a system harmed human beings or “just” put to use insensate creatures, who, because they were unfeeling, were rightly used, according to slavers. Such beliefs tell us whether black youth “deserved” protection, since unfeeling children need not be protected. In fact, these beliefs essentially tell us whether black children even existed before the 1960s, given that “children,” by definition, or so it’s been agreed upon for the last centuries in Euro-America, are those people who must be protected. Still, why do dolls of particular shades get slipped inside this story – black rubber dolls, minstrel dolls; soft-cloth dolls that signify rape, yet are made for children to take to bed with them; dolls with a [End Page 566] history, dolls who go onstage; dolls who eventually have their day in court? The doll is a “prompt,” in the language of the theatre, for a set of actions connected to feelings. It’s a crucial index to forms of human hurt – or an invitation to believe in insensation. There’s another stage in the drama being told, one that works in tandem with the prompts of dolls. In fact, it explains, at least to my mind, how the material culture of dolls takes its cues from narrative and theatre, in some measure. Bernstein names as a major archive of “racial innocence”– no surprise here – Uncle Tom’s Cabin. And her presentation of its role in these formations is rich, indeed, packed with factoids about the Tomitudes, as they were called (playing cards, figurines, handkerchiefs, and plays) that accompanied Uncle Tom’s Cabin to fame. In fact, she reminds us that the novel never existed on its own, prior to the cultural phenomena it spawned. Before Stowe’s fiction was ever serialized, it appeared as pages she read to her children and as illustrations, immensely influential, that were advertisements. Or as Bernstein states it, using terms from theatre: “Uncle Tom’s Cabin is best understood as a repertoire” of thought, emotion, and gesture (14). And the array of items, images, and dramas it birthed were “scriptive things that archive that repertoire,” the latter being “by definition relational,” since “it exists among people, over time, and . . . through people’s everyday physical engagements with things” (14). Why, exactly, was Stowe so central to these racial repertoires? And what do they have to do with dolls? In short, “Stowe did...

FRAGMENTO DE UM DISCURSO (DES)PASSIONALIZADO

Seguindo a trilha do inteligível ao sensível, este artigo pretende mostrar que a enunciação passional reorganiza o dizer comprometido apenas com o factual e seu efeito de objetividade no texto. A partir da dimensão sensível que a assunção das paixões inscreve em seu percurso enunciativo, é possível desvelar os efeitos de sentido que essa estratégia de composição textual aporta às relações entre enunciador e enunciatário, bem como aos efeitos de persuasão. Para isso, escolhemos como objeto as bonecas pretas produzidas artesanalmente em Conceição das Crioulas, comunidade quilombola do sertão pernambucano, mais precisamente um fragmento de texto verbal que constitui o folder explicativo que as acompanha, cuja leitura seguirá pressupostos do quadro teórico da semiótica greimasiana.

Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights (review)

Reviewed by: Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights Richard Flynn (bio) Robin Bernstein. Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights. New York: New York UP, 2011. Combining performance studies with historical and cultural analysis, Robin Bernstein’s Racial Innocence offers an innovative argument, demonstrating that the performance of childhood is central to “large-scale racial projects” from slavery and abolition to the early civil rights movement. Bernstein attempts to “intervene in a central problem in the field of childhood studies: the relationship between young people (‘children’) and the cultural construct of ‘childhood’” (22). She painstakingly and cogently supports her claims through sensitive and well-documented close readings of material, literary, and visual culture, from the “repertoire” of Uncle Tom’s Cabin to the “Black-and-Whiteness of Raggedy Ann” with its roots in minstrelsy, and from L. Frank Baum’s Oz series to the doll studies of Kenneth and Mamie Clark, in which black dolls scripted a performance of innocence that “refuted the libel that black youth could not feel pain” (241). Noting that “constructed childhood and juvenile humans exist in tension with if not in opposition to each other,” Bernstein draws important insights from the field of performance studies that scholars of children’s literature and culture might usefully explore as a way out of some of our dead-end arguments. The recognition that “childhood is a performance” can help us account for “the simultaneity and mutual constitution of children and childhood” (22). Building on the theories of Joseph Roach, Peggy Phelan, Diana Taylor, and others, Bernstein engages the reader in a complex, nuanced, and original examination of the ways in which notions of childhood innocence in nineteenth- and twentieth-century America have provided “deep cover” for “the construction and maintenance of whiteness” (7–8). Performance theory enables Bernstein to practice a method of reading material culture as “scriptive things” (8). This method, she argues, allows for a dynamic reading of children’s culture and a corrective to critics such as James Kincaid and Jacqueline Rose, who present children’s culture as “created by one empowered group (adults) and given to or forced upon another disempowered group (children)” (28–29). A script, Bernstein points out, offers directions for structuring a performance that in theatrical practice will, in the hands of “actors, directors and designers,” result in “complex, variable performances that occupy real time and space” (12). Live performance itself is both embodied and temporal. Building upon Peggy Phelan’s work in Unmarked: The [End Page 209] Politics of Performance (1993), Bernstein recognizes that childhood, “defined by loss and consternated memory,” is “always in the act of disappearing” as it is being enacted (23–24). Applied to material culture, a “‘scriptive thing,’ like a playscript” broadly structures a performance while allowing for agency and unleashing original, live variations that may not be individually predictable. Items of material culture script in much the same sense that literary texts mean: neither a thing nor a poem (for example) is conscious or agential, but a thing may invite behaviors that its maker did and did not envision, and a poem may produce meanings that include and exceed the poet’s intentions. (12) The “top-down understanding of children’s culture” fails to understand that children are “experts in the scripts of children’s culture,” that they are “virtuoso performers” (28), and that the meanings of their performances “cannot be easily contained or controlled”: “Children do not passively receive culture. Rather, children expertly field the co-scripts of narratives and material culture and then collectively forge a third prompt: play itself. The three prompts then entangle to script future play, which continues to change as children collectively exercise agency” (29). Bernstein recognizes, of course, that dominant cultures interpellate children, but the performance of childhood is a complex process that “occurs through surrogation, which Joseph R. Roach defines as the process by which ‘culture reproduces and re-creates itself’” (22). “Childhood itself,” argues Bernstein, “is best understood as a process of surrogation, an endless attempt to find, fashion, and impel substitutes to fill a void caused by the loss of a half-forgotten original” (23). In chapter 1...

Serious Play

Serious Play Katharine Capshaw Smith Cultural historian Robin Bernstein recently gave a talk at my university on the Kenneth and Mamie Clark doll experiments of the 1940s. These experiments, now famous, asked African American children to select between black and white dolls. The record of children's preference for white dolls, as well as the young people's despair at being presented with such a choice, became potent evidence for efforts at school integration, particularly during the Brown v. Board of Education hearings. Bernstein's fascinating presentation focused not on the uses of the experiments within the civil rights campaign, however, but on the way in which children's facility with cultural expectations for doll play helped influence the choice between a black and a white doll. In short, black dolls had historically been used in play associated with violence, and children's reluctance to select the black doll revealed their resistance to the American cultural practice of defiling black bodies. One of Bernstein's observations allowed me to reflect on unspoken assumptions about children's culture within the field of literary criticism: "In my research on doll-play, I constantly found the phrase 'supposed to': children reported that they knew how they were 'supposed to' play with different dolls. Sometimes they did what they were 'supposed to' do, other times they refused, but they consistently understood the play scenarios that dolls prompted, the traditions of performance that dolls referred to." Stepping back from the particular example of the Clarks' experiments, I wondered then about the expectations for critical play with children's books within the field of literary studies. How are we able to challenge cultural "givens" about the place and purposes of children's texts? What are we "supposed to do" with children's literature, and how do we engage and often resist such expectations? The essays in this issue of the Quarterly all reveal an awareness of cultural expectations for children's texts and then spotlight moments of resistance to such expectations; our essays analyze re-imaginings of texts and of authorial identity or themselves demonstrate resistant critical practices. In other words, they do not play the way they are "supposed to" play, and for [End Page 1] that I am grateful. Adrienne Kertzer's essay, "Fidelity, Felicity, and Playing Around in Wes Anderson's Fantastic Mr. Fox," discusses expectations for film adaptations of children's books, arguing that Anderson cannily understands the cultural demand for fidelity to the source text, but he instead offers "a tribute" to Dahl influenced largely by Anderson's own childhood experiences rather than by textual accuracy. In one section of the essay, Kertzer looks at the figure of a more critical and ironic Mrs. Fox in the adaptation, finding that "The film thereby functions as both a tribute and a critique, differing significantly from previous filmic adaptations that never consider challenging Dahl's depiction of adult women." Adaptations play with children's texts, even as they pledge to be faithful to the original, and Kertzer's essay asks us to reconsider attraction to the idea of a stable text. Joseph T. Thomas Jr. studies a persona of one of the most popular children's poets of the twentieth century, Shel Silverstein. To say that this persona has been overlooked or ignored is an understatement; the "Uncle Shelby" version of Silverstein is bawdy, earthy, irreverent, and iconoclastic, qualities not typically embraced by the children's book–buying public. Thomas discusses the larger purposes of re-imagining our popular authors: "Shel Silverstein and his persona, Uncle Shelby, provide us with a more robust way to think about children's literature, reminding us that the line between texts for adults and those for children is far more blurry than we generally like to believe, as is the line between child culture and adult culture, even though we like to police that line with ever-growing determination." According to Thomas, ignoring Silverstein's publications within the pages of Playboy magazine has restricted our awareness of the scope of his attention, as well as limited our appreciation of the ambition of his authorial presentations. If Thomas bucks our expectations for reading Shel Silverstein, Lydia Kokkola takes...

Children's Books, Dolls, and the Performance of Race; or, The Possibility of Children's Literature

In about 1855, three decades before frances hodgson burnett wrote her first best-selling children's book,little lord fauntleroy, she was a child—Frances Eliza Hodgson—and she read Harriet Beecher Stowe'sUncle Tom's Cabin.She found Stowe's novel, like all the stories she encountered, to be “unsatisfactory, filling her with vague, restless craving for greater completeness of form” (Burnett 44). The form the girl craved—that is, the material she believed she needed to complete the narrative—was a black doll. When Burnett obtained the doll, she named it Topsy and used it to “act” out the parts of the novel she found most “thrilling” (53). Casting a white doll she already owned as Little Eva, she played out ever-repeating scenes of Eva laying hands on Topsy, awakening the hardened slave girl to Christian love. Burnett also kept the Eva doll “actively employed slowly fading away and dying,” and in these scenes she took on the role of Uncle Tom (57). At other times, Burnett performed the scene of Eva's death, casting the white doll as Eva and herself as “all the weeping slaves at once” (58). And at least once she designated the doll Uncle Tom and cast herself as Simon Legree. For this scenario, the girl bound the doll to a candelabra stand. “[F]urious with insensate rage,” she whipped her doll (fig. 1). Throughout the whipping, the doll maintained a “cheerfully hideous” grin, which suggested to the girl that Uncle Tom was “enjoying the situation” of being “brutally lashed” (56, 55).

Black Children, White Preference: Brown v. Board , the Doll Tests, and the Politics of Self-Esteem

In Brown v. Board of Education the Supreme Court cited psychologist Kenneth B. Clark for evidence that segregation damaged black children’s self-esteem and hampered their ability to learn. Clark and his wife Mamie had tested black children’s “racial preference” by asking them to choose between black dolls and white dolls, interpreting the choice of white dolls as evidence of damaged self-esteem. After Brown , the Clarks’ studies set the parameters for research on racial identity, self-esteem, and child development—even though they were discredited on methodological and statistical grounds in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Subsequent research showed that the doll tests do not measure self-esteem and, further, that African American children do not have low self-esteem. Nonetheless, social science remains invested in the conception of proper racial identification. The doll tests’ contested history suggests that we need to replace this conception with a model of adaptive, negotiated, and hybrid racial identification.

Jackie Ormes: The First African American Woman Cartoonist (review)

Reviewed by: Jackie Ormes: The First African American Woman Cartoonist E. Frances White (bio) Nancy Goldstein. Jackie Ormes: The First African American Woman Cartoonist. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2008. 240 pp. 164 illus. 18 color strip pp. ISBN 978-04721-1624-9, $35.00. Nancy Goldstein has rescued an unusual woman from obscurity: Zelda "Jackie" Ormes, the first African American woman cartoonist. Largely interested in dolls and doll history, Goldstein discovered more than she expected while researching dolls in the University of Michigan microfilm room. As she looked up information on Patty-Jo, one of the first realistic black dolls made for the African-American market, she discovered the cartoon character on which she was based, and the cartoonist—Jackie Ormes, creator of Patty-Jo'n Ginger. Goldstein's goal is clearly stated in the preface: "My objective in writing this book has been to draw greater attention to the life of an extraordinary artist and to present a significant portion of her work, in its historical context, for others to see and enjoy" (ix). While the book is somewhat repetitive, Goldstein meets her goal admirably by mining the archives carefully and explaining the milieu in which Ormes lived and worked. Ormes (1911–1985) grew up in a small Pennsylvania town near Pittsburgh; her family was relatively prosperous. She practiced drawing early, and published her first cartoons in her high school yearbooks for 1929 and 1930. She knew very early in her life that she wanted to be in the newspaper business, and got a job while in high school doing some minor reporting for the Pittsburgh Courier, one of the most influential African-American newspapers. After high school she moved to Pittsburgh, where she worked as a proofreader and occasional reporter for the Courier. The relations she built during this period were to prove vital for her career as a cartoonist. As Goldstein recognizes, Ormes wanted a career in print journalism during a time, the mid-twentieth century, when African American newspapers were central to the construction of black community relations and national agendas. A local black newspaper and one or more of the papers that circulated nationally, such as The Pittsburgh Courier and The Chicago Defender, served many black communities during the height of segregation. The more national newspapers reached the growing literate urbanites among African-Americans, but were also read aloud to the non-literate in the north and the south. The papers often lured readers to their pages with sensational, yellow journalistic articles. At the same time, these papers commented on the politics of the day, both domestic and international. They gave Black communities all over the country the opportunity to discuss topics that ranged from the latest horrible lynching, to the opportunities in the north, to the place of African Americans in World War II. [End Page 548] Ormes's cartoons were carried prominently in both the Courier and the Defender. Her first cartoon, Torchy Brown in "Dixie to Harlem," appeared in the Pittsburgh Courier from May 1, 1937 to April 30, 1938. A comic strip story, it followed a young Mississippi teen who migrated to New York and found fame and fortune at the well-known Cotton Club. Torchy Brown was followed by Candy, a short-lived (March 24 to July 21, 1945), single panel cartoon that featured a wisecracking domestic worker. Appearing on the editorial page of the Chicago Defender, the cartoon took up serious political issues, often targeting a Mrs. Goldrocks, the employer, who regularly used the wartime black market but who never actually appeared in the comic. Ormes's longest running cartoon, Patty-Jo 'n Ginger, appeared in the Pittsburgh Courier from October 1945 to October 1956. Goldstein appropriately spends a good deal of time on this cartoon. Patty-Jo was an unusual character for American cartoons. She was stylish, showing up in a new outfit every issue. Usually her sarcastic, even caustic barbs were directed at her older beautiful sister, Ginger, who never had a speaking role but whose facial expressions emphasized Patty-Jo's meaning. Often, Patty-Jo commented on Ginger's never-ending attempt to find a husband. For example, as Ginger puts the phone down...

Reexamination of Young Children's Racial Attitudes and Skin Tone Preferences

This study continues the line of research on children's racial preferences that dates to Kenneth and Mamie Clark's classic research that revealed that Black children preferred White dolls and attributed more positive characteristics to White dolls than to Black dolls. In the current research, the authors examined Black and White preschool children's preferences for cartoon characters of different skin tones and whether their preferences shifted after listening to a moral story depicting a Black child as a hero. Findings are discussed in the context of how method of presentation may affect young children's responses and children's preferences in relation to race awareness and self-identification.

Dances with Things

Proceeding from Robyn Wiegman's call for a transition from questions of “why” to “how” with regard to formations of race, this article proposes a heuristic, the “scriptive thing,” to analyze ways in which racial subjectivation emerges through everyday physical engagement with the material world. The term scriptive thing integrates performance studies and “thing theory” by highlighting the ways in which things prompt, structure, or choreograph behavior. A knife, a camera, and a novel all invite—indeed, create occasions for—repetitions of acts, distinctive and meaningful motions of eyes, hands, shoulders, hips, feet. These things are citational in that they arrange and propel bodies in recognizable ways, through paths of evocative movement that have been traveled before. I use the term script as a theatrical professional might, to denote not a rigid dictation of performed action but, rather, a necessary openness to resistance, interpretation, and improvisation. A “scriptive thing,” like a play script, broadly structures a performance while unleashing original, live variations. Like the police in Louis Althusser's famous scenario, scriptive things leap out within a field, address an individual, and demand to be reckoned with. By answering a hail, by entering the scripted scenario, the individual is interpellated into ideology and thus into subjecthood. I conduct close readings of scriptive things, including a photograph of a light-skinned woman posing in about 1930 with a caricature of a young African American man, a set of twentieth-century arcade photographs, a viciously racist 1898 alphabet book by E. W. Kemble, and a black doll called “Uncle Tom” that was whipped in the 1850s by a white girl who would grow up to write best-selling children's books. These readings show how interpellation occurs through confrontations in the material world, through dances between people and things.

Sara Lee: The Rise and Fall of the Ultimate Negro Doll

Much ado has been made about the importance of black dolls as messengers of racial self‐esteem for Black children. This article documents the relationship between and contributions of Eleanor Roosevelt, Sara Lee Creech, and race leaders such as Zora Neale Hurston, Mordecai Johnson, Benjamin Mays, and Ralph Bunche in the development of the first "anthropologically correct" Negro doll—the Sara Lee Doll—during the early 1950s.

Reading/Photographs: Emma Dunham Kelley-Hawkins's Four Girls at Cottage City, Victoria Earle Matthews, and The Woman's Era

Once exposed as a fraud ... you can never regain your legitimacy. For the violated criterion of legitimacy implicitly presumes an absolute incompatibility between the person you appeared to be and the person you are now revealed to be. Adrian Piper, for White, Passing for What, in fact, does it mean to rely on evidence when discussing blackness? Daphne A. Brooks, Bodies in Dissent This essay focuses on late-nineteenth-century photography, and reform, as well as on re-forming contemporary interpretative practices that frame visual, racial, and historical evidence. Here I address the ways in which reading race and assimilating iconographic representation became increasingly central to late-nineteenth-century reading culture, bringing into view the emphasis on interpretation that is posed as critical to women's development. In her 1864 essay, Originality of Ideas, Julia C. Collins counsels female of the African American newspaper the Christian Recorder to sharpen their analytical skills, averring, It is good to read, but better to think. It is best to spend only half that time in reading, she exhorts, and advises her to use the remaining time in interpretative practice (127). (1) Collins anticipates the advice of subsequent Black thinkers, such as Anna Julia Cooper and Victoria Earle Matthews, and reflects the counsel expressed in the columns of the Woman's Era, the official news organ of the Black women's club movement. (2) As I will explore here, these principles are in nearly perfect alignment with those undergirding female development in Emma Dunham Kelley-Hawkins's novel Four Girls at Cottage City. The novel takes up the mutually constitutive relation between women's development and reform in ways that mirror the arc described in the pages of the Woman's Era and that are expressed throughout the Black clubwomen's movement. I frame this essay with a consideration of the twists and turns in Kelley-Hawkins's taxonomic history and with an examination of the politics of her recent reclassification as a white woman writer after decades of being categorized as Black. Through my critical lens, the recent discovery does not illustrate historical and interpretative mistakes African American(ist) archivists and critics have made; rather, it illuminates how Kelley-Hawkins is embedded in a cultural and iconographic archive that speaks to the multiple, conflicting, and multivalent investments in reading individual bodies and texts in relationship to sociocultural bodies of racial knowledge. I close by examining Four Girls and its lead heroine, Vera Earle, in the context of the contemporaneous prominence of journalist and activist Victoria Earle (Matthews) and what I call the photographic bylines in the Woman's Era. Frances E. W. Harper's choice of her heroine's name in Iola Leroy recalls Ida B. Wells's pen name, an echo that supports Frances Smith Foster's assertion that Harper was careful to select figures who were familiar to and instructive for the greatest number of readers (141). (3) Kelley-Hawkins's Vera Earle and Victoria Earle share closely coupled homonymic and phenotypic features. Additionally, in relation to many of the values Four Girls espouses, Vera Earle serves as a double of Victoria Earle, the journalistic name Matthews used. The connections between Vera Earle and Victoria Earle likewise augment the emphasis in Four Girls on education, and club work and further connect the novel to a broader overlapping circle of Black literary and political exchange. In this--and in its new--context, Vera Earle familiarly repeats the ways Iola functions as a narratively budding character planted in ground tended by an accomplished and actual writer, thinker, and activist. This histotextual link simultaneously re- and de-familiarizes readers' social understanding of cross-racial tropes, conjoinings, and cultural exchanges. (4) In the recent and broad publicity about Kelley-Hawkins's identity, her case has often been covered much as one might handle a nineteenth-century topsy-turvy doll: (5) flip her upside down, and the Black doll becomes white. …

Black Dolls as Racial Uplift: A Preliminary Report

Transforming AnthropologyVolume 13, Issue 1 p. 55-56 Black Dolls as Racial Uplift: A Preliminary Report Sabrina Lynette Thomas, Sabrina Lynette ThomasSearch for more papers by this author Sabrina Lynette Thomas, Sabrina Lynette ThomasSearch for more papers by this author First published: 07 January 2008 https://doi.org/10.1525/tran.2005.13.1.55AboutPDF ToolsExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume13, Issue1April 2005Pages 55-56 RelatedInformation

African Americans in Currier and Ives's America: The Darktown Series

Today most Americans recognize them as creators of Christmas card and calendar Americana. In nineteenth century, however, and Ives called their company Grand Central Depot for Cheap and Popular Prints. They proudly advertised themselves as the best, cheapest, and most popular firm in a democratic country, providing colored engravings for people. In process they created a legacy of over 7000 prints that sold in uncounted millions of copies-at one time 95% of all lithographs in circulation in United States (Currier and Ives I: xxxviii-xxxxi, Karshan 31). and Ives never intended to create or promote fine art, or even to produce prints of great value. Rather, they sought to produce images of nineteenth-- America that would be attractive to their largely middle-class clientele. As Harry T. Peters, most prominent collector of and Ives prints and related materials, wrote decades ago: Currier and Ives were businessmen and craftsmen ... but primarily they [were] mirrors of national taste, weather vanes of popular opinion, reflectors of American attitudes.... In their prints can be found whole florid panorama of our national life in mid-nineteenth century (Peters 7). and Ives created a pictorial record of nineteenth-century America, but not as conscious historians. They operated on terms buying public-certainly a huge number-would accept. By-and-large they avoided conflicting reality and controversy, and when persuaded to take a stand on such subjects, they chose the side of heaviest artillery. But they were not entirely positive, either. Many prints conveyed critical, negative, or at least cautionary messages, in obvious and subtle ways, again reflecting concerns or fears of their audience. This was especially true of and Ives's images of African Americans, few of which have been included in many published collections and retrospective exhibitions of past century. I do not have space-nor is it necessary-to review history of American attitudes toward African Americans in nineteenth century. Instead, I would like to briefly examine and Ives's representation of African Americans from 1840s through 1880s which, in fact, reflects that history in all its twists and turns and complexities. What we find in that fifty-year run of prints is an initial inclination to picture horror of slavery, from which company quickly retreated; withdrawal of African Americans into background of prints on life in antebellum America; their being summoned during 1850s, '60s, and '70s as cause of sectional politics and civil war; and finally, at end of century, their being pictured as completely incapable of advancing beyond their previous condition of servitude to live like civilized whites. My primary focus will be on final stage of this pictorial narrative as told in company's best-selling Darktown series-a large collection of prints all but unknown today. As one might expect, slavery was subject of hundreds of prints in antebellum period. The majority reflected prevailing stereotype, in North and South, of happy, contented slave, a laughing, simple-minded retainer who thrived under paternalism of his kindly master, and that, given his innate inferiority, was better off as part of South's institution than he would be in competitive, free-labor system in North (Thompson 283). Several artists were critical of South's peculiar institution. See, for example, David Claypoole Johnson's Early Development of Southern Chivalry (undated), in which a smiling Southern boy, much to amused admiration of his sister (holding a black doll by hair), whips a second black doll, stripped to waist and tied to chair (Williams 28). But they did not reflect majority opinion on slavery, even in North. …

A Cross-Cultural Examination of Racial Identity and Racial Preference of Preschool Children in the West Indies

The present study investigated the racial attitudes of preschool children in the West Indies. The Clarks' 1947 study found that both Black and White preschool children evaluate White dolls more positively than Black dolls. In this study, 302 children from four islands in the West Indies were presented with Black and White Cabbage Patch dolls. A Black female examiner instructed the children to choose a doll to play with from two dolls identical in every respect except skin coloring. The standard Clark doll questions and four more questions added by the researcher were also individually administered. In addition, 34 of the 302 children were administered a multiple-alternative method instead of the original forced-choice method only. It was found the majority (71.9%) of West Indian children when presented with Black dolls and White dolls chose to play with the White doll. The implication is that in spite of the fact that the West Indies is composed of a majority Black population, the impact of colonialism has left a debilitating effect on West Indians.

Implications of Doll Color Preferences among Black Preschool Children and White Preschool Children

Years after the "Black is beautiful" movement there remains a preference for white among Black and White preschool children. Black children have learned to reject their ethnic group as a consequence of pervasive negative stereotypes promoted by the media, teachers, parents, and the broader society. This article examined implications of previous research in 1985, which employed the Clark doll test (Clark & Clark, 1940), with the addition of a treatment intervention including learning principles of modeling, reinforcement, and color meaning word associations (Powell-Hopson, 1985). It was demonstrated that racial preferences among children could be changed at least temporarily. Pretest percentages showed that a majority of Black and White preschoolers chose a white doll when asked preference questions. In contrast, intervention posttest measurement revealed a significant percentage of preschoolers chose a black doll. We as scientists and clinicians have the tools to foster development of healthy positive self-images in youth, in particular Black children.

Perceptions of Racially Related Stimuli by Young Children

The colors white and black are used as symbolic referents for, respectively, positive and negative evaluations. Studies are reviewed which describe the nature and extent of children's association of white with good and black with bad. A total of 375 white and 399 black children were tested. White and black preschool children respond similarly to the colors white and black, but white children show more polarization in their color associations than do black children. When children were filmed as they hit white or black boxes or bobo dolls with plastic baseball bats, black objects were more often the target than white objects. Preschool children's evaluative associations to the colors white and black are related to their choices of white or black playmates in a free-play situation. As child ten become older, their perceptions of the colors white and black become differentiated from their perceptions of white and black people.