Performing American Childhood Research Articles

How Cute! Race, Gender, and Neutrality in Libraries

This essay explores how feminization and a particular aestheticization thereof is called upon to attempt to mitigate, veil, and neutralize whiteness in libraries and librarianship. It looks specifically at cuteness, an aesthetic category historically shaped by, and deeply invested in, hegemonic formulations of gender, race, and consumption. This paper explores the types of projects cuteness might abet in librarianship—particularly aspirations of political neutrality—by positioning itself as for all and against none. Indeed, by calling forth its purported timeless appeal and assuming an aesthetic that no one can resist, cuteness positions the whiteness central to it as both harmless and universal. This essay explores how this category, with its claims of innocence, utilizes a nostalgic white femininity to gesture to a romanticized yet fabricated past that subsequently precludes acknowledgment of and engagement with the present, including race, gender, and other axes of difference. It also addresses how this aesthetic has surfaced in critical and progressive library spaces, drawing attention to the ways in which it has been celebrated, subverted, and made politically productive. Finally, this paper demonstrates the importance of exploring aesthetics and material culture, however tangential they might seem to both the practical and theoretical work of libraries. We must ask after what cuteness and other aesthetic categories that mark librarianship invite us to do, as well as the types of work that they preclude.
 Cet essai examine comment la féminisation et une esthétisation particulière de celle-ci sont appelées à tenter d'atténuer, de voiler et de neutraliser la présence « blanche » dans les bibliothèques et la bibliothéconomie. L’essai porte spécifiquement sur l’aspect « mignon », une catégorie esthétique façonnée historiquement par des formulations hégémoniques de genre, de race et de consommation. Cet article explore les types de projets que l’aspect « mignon » pourrait assister en bibliothéconomie – en particulier des aspirations de neutralité politique – en se positionnant comme pour tous et contre aucun. En effet, en invoquant son soi-disant attrait intemporel et en supposant une esthétique à laquelle personne ne peut résister, l’aspect « mignon » donne au concept de la présence « blanche » qui lui est central un côté à la fois inoffensif et universel. Cet essai explore comment cette catégorie, avec ses réclamations d'innocence, utilise une féminité blanche nostalgique pour signaler un passé romantique mais fabriqué qui empêche subséquemment de reconnaître et de s’engager avec le présent, y compris la race, le genre et d'autres axes de différence. Il aborde également de quelle façon cette esthétique a émergé dans les espaces critiques et progressifs des bibliothèques, en soulignant les façons dont elle a été célébrée, renversée et rendue productive sur le plan politique. Enfin, cet article montre l'importance d'explorer l'esthétique et la culture matérielle, même si elles paraissent indirectes au travail pratique et théorique des bibliothèques. Nous devons nous demander ce que l’aspect « mignon » et les autres catégories esthétiques qui marquent la bibliothéconomie nous invitent à faire, ainsi que les types de travail qu'ils empêchent.

The Ambiguous Role of Agency in Childhood Studies

Robin Bernstein's Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights. New York: New York University Press, 2011.Courtney Weikle-Milis's Imaginary Citizens: Child Readers and the Limits of American Independence, 1640-1868. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013.C. Dallett Hemphill's Siblings: Brothers and Sisters in American History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.Childhood studies frequently exhibits dueling interests regarding child agency: while some scholars critique the ways in which childrens rights are limited, others champion the means by which children still exercise control. Recent books by Robin Bernstein, Courtney Weikle-Mills, and C. Dallett Hemphill demonstrate just how much assessments of childrens agency can vary. While Bernstein focuses on how childrens culture can be appropriated for political agendas, Weikle-Mills looks at how literature for and about children often affirms changes in their status as citizens. Finally, via an archival analysis of family culture, Hemphill reconstructs the experience of actual historical children to demonstrate the significance of sibling relationships to one's ability to adapt to a rapidly changing cultural landscape.In a world filled with DVD collections and streaming media, many of us find ourselves returning to the television shows and films that delighted us as children, only to discover how thickly they are layered with the prejudices of the period in which they were created. Believing we are escaping to a world free of a political agenda, we instead find ourselves bumping up against the same problematic ideologies we ask students to identify and resenting the education we received without realizing it. Bernstein's Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights focuses on this tendency of children's culture to give the appearance of existing outside a political context.Bernstein's concept of racial innocence refers to the ways that the child can be used to make political projects appear innocuous, natural, and therefore justified (33). Bernstein illustrates this process in her first chapter, in which she compares the cover image of the book-a Cottolene advertisement from the 1890s featuring a young, smiling black girl hugging a soft cloud of cotton-with a photograph of a young white child in a cotton field. While the photograph of the white child is clearly meant to protest child labor, the Cottolene advertisement nefariously presents the black child as happily embracing the product she helps to produce and, by extension, the labor she had to perform to produce it. Such images, Bernstein argues, were responsible for perpetuating the idea that black children were insensate, immune to pain, a belief that culminated in the figure of the invulnerable pickaninny.Bernsteins second chapter then demonstrates her methodology for examining material culture, explaining that the primary question to ask about a material object is what practices it both invites and discourages. Bernstein shows that a wide variety of material objects historically affirmations and approval of black insensateness: from black rubber dolls whose very composition encouraged rough treatment, to E. W. Kemble's 1898 A Coon Alphabet, a collection of rhymes about black children that frequently end in violence and that invite the reader to participate in that violence by turning the page to reveal it. In subsequent chapters, Bernstein examines how illustrations and theatrical adaptions altered the ideologies of Uncle Tom's Cabin-, analyzes the forms of play scripted by the popular cuddly doll Raggedy Ann and the books sold with it; and questions whether Kenneth and Mamie Clark were correct to assume, as they did in the 1940s, that black childrens preference for white dolls bespoke their internalized racism rather than attitudes about play.Weikle-Mills s Imaginary Citizens: Child Readers and the Limits of American Independence, 1640-1868 also presents a concept with far-ranging applications for childhood studies: that of imaginary citizens, individuals who could not exercise civic rights but who were, in Bernsteins terms, to see themselves as citizens. …

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 Tavia Nyong’o Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights. By Robin Bernstein. New York: New York University Press, 2011. pp. 318. $24.00 paper. The enduring popularity of the trope of “internalized racism” in the pedagogy of minority empowerment has always been somewhat paradoxical. The explanatory power of this catchphrase would appear weak. Since racism is targeted at people, how could it be other than internalized, given that it hits its mark? Furthermore, the strategic value of this trope is hard to see, insofar as it redirects attention from the perpetrators of hatred and racism and toward their victims, among whom an invidious distinction is drawn between those who manage to ward off the racist interpellation and those who reenact it upon themselves and all who share their identity. Such a pernicious dualism between good and bad victims of racism would appear counterproductive to any robust psychology of empowerment and liberation. But this has not prevented the dualism from being drawn, as taxonomies of racial self-hatred continue to proliferate in the vernacular. Robin Bernstein’s impressively researched, cogently written, and deeply theorized new book, Racial Innocence, offers one ingenious answer, at least in the case of the U.S. black/white dichotomy, to the popularity of internalized self-hatred as an explanatory model. Turning to the rich archive of childhood as lived, imagined, and performed, she argues that we must turn to a critical genealogy of the concept of childhood innocence to understand the paradoxical appeal of “damage.” Children, she reminds us, were not always considered innocent, vulnerable subjects, but (at least within Calvinist orthodoxy) as guilty of original sin. When children began to be reimagined as innocent in romantic and sentimental American culture, their innocence found a privileged figure in the little white girl. It wasn’t American childhood as such that became innocent but a specifically raced and gendered childhood. This had important consequences for abolitionist and, later, civil rights activists. Embracing the culture (or was it [End Page 146] the cult?) of the child, antiracists sought to extend this privilege of innocence to black boys and girls, in part by demonstrating their equal capacity to suffer. But, as Bernstein shows with depressingly exhaustive evidence, the culture of white supremacy inculcated an ideology of black insensateness, contrasting with white sensibility. White supremacy excused performed and real violence against black bodies because of their allegedly greater capacity to endure pain and be obliviously happy. Pedagogies of childhood play—evidence of which Bernstein finds in novels, memoirs, illustrations, playbills, figurines, songsheets, photographs, and dolls, to sample just some of the range of her evidence—reinforced this white supremacist dichotomy between white fragility and black obdurateness. Harriet Beecher Stowe, who sought to demonstrate the damage slavery did to black children through her character Topsy, found that her own creation became one of the most enduring sites for the reproduction in performance of the mythically insensate black child. Harmless, innocent fun (as evidenced in an astonishing chapter on the minstrel roots of Raggedy Ann and Andy) became a disavowed site for the reproduction of white supremacy. Elements of this argument have been outlined in the literature, for instance in Saidiya Hartman’s influential Scenes of Subjection (1997). What Bernstein contributes is a novel methodology for interpreting the archival record for its performances, or “scripts” as she calls them. Her chosen term is deliberately situated between the historical/textual and the embodied/live. It draws upon performance studies, thing theory, material culture, visual culture, and literary analysis to propose that objects in the archive leave evidence as to how they “want” to be used. That is, much as a playscript inclines the performance derived from it toward particular ends, even if a particular staging is revisionist or resistant toward those ends, things possess “scripts” that direct their users toward forms of model behavior. These directions can be derived both from their contexts (descriptions and prescriptions of their uses) and a close analysis of the things themselves. Much of the book is engaged in tracking these everyday scripts of childhood: crying, cuddling, laughing; touching...

Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Reading Revolution: Race, Literacy, Childhood, and Fiction, 1851–1911 by Barbara Hochman, and: Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights by Robin Bernstein (review)

Reviewed by: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Reading Revolution: Race, Literacy, Childhood, and Fiction, 1851–1911 by Barbara Hochman, and: Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights by Robin Bernstein E. Wyn James Barbara Hochman, Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Reading Revolution: Race, Literacy, Childhood, and Fiction, 1851–1911. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. xviii + 377 pp. Robin Bernstein, Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights. New York: New York University Press, 2011. xii + 308 pp. The “Uncle Tom” industry shows no signs of slowing down, with a steady stream of books and articles flowing off the production line. Perhaps that was inevitable [End Page 173] during the two hundredth anniversary of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s birth in 2011, a year which saw not only the publication of David S. Reynolds’s masterly Mightier than the Sword: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Battle for America, and his introduction to the reissue of the “Splendid Edition” of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, but also the two substantial and stimulating volumes under review here. In her preface, Barbara Hochman describes her volume as “first and last a book about reading in context” (xi). It explores the changes in the reception and the cultural meaning of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (UTC), and “ongoing changes in reading habits and print culture more broadly” (xi), between the appearance of its first installment in the abolitionist weekly, The National Era, in June 1851 and the centenary of Stowe’s birth in 1911. Hochman draws on a wide range of sources, including prefaces, reviews, letters, diaries, marginalia, advertisements, and illustrations, and examines the multiple forms in which Stowe’s novel appeared: as newspaper installments, illustrated volumes, and adaptations for children. Her book is an important contribution to the history of reading, a field of study that has flourished increasingly in recent decades. Hochman explains in her introduction that in the early stages of this “return of the reader” in the 1970s and 1980s — a period which also saw a significant revival of interest in UTC — the “reader” was a theoretical construct “implied” by the text itself and requiring “neither historical specificity nor an interest in individual readers” (8). This changed with the advent of the “new historicism,” which “fueled a growing desire to reconstruct literary meanings and reading habits of the past” (8). However, as Hochman notes, there are tensions inherent in this juxtaposition of “text” and “reader” which raise questions regarding the autonomy of the reader and whether “meaning is a function of the reader or the text” (9) — perhaps “artifact” might be better than “text” here, since “meaning” and “reader response” involve not only the verbal text and illustrative material, but also the physical appearance of the artifact (size, layout, typography, binding, etc.). Incidentally, this underlines the importance of preserving such artifacts, so that texts may be studied in their original contexts; for while one welcomes wholeheartedly the wide accessibility of texts facilitated by the digital revolution, when it comes to digital copies versus original materials, the policy should most certainly be “both/and” and not “either/or” (see, for example, Tanselle). Barbara Hochman’s approach is to combine an emphasis on both reader and text, mediating between them rather than choosing one over the other (9). In her first chapter, she indicates one of the reasons why UTC engendered passionate and profound emotions in its readers from the start1 by contrasting Stowe’s work with the general content of The National Era, the newspaper in which it first appeared [End Page 174] in installments. The Era was unusual amongst abolitionist periodicals in the prominence it gave to fiction. Ironically, that fiction provided respite for the paper’s readers by avoiding the subject of slavery. Furthermore, in the factual content of the newspaper, fugitive slaves tended to be described briefly in distant, abstract, stereotypical terms, rather than depicted in ways that would elicit sympathy. In contrast, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel facilitates an emotional identification by portraying black slaves in concrete terms as fully human with the same thoughts, feelings and desires as her white readers. In her second chapter, Hochman focuses on one particular...

Slavery in American Children’s Literature, 1790–2010 by Paula T. Connolly

Reviewed by: Slavery in American Children’s Literature, 1790–2010 by Paula T. Connolly M. Tyler Sasser (bio) Connolly, Paula T. Slavery in American Children’s Literature, 1790–2010. Iowa City: Iowa UP, 2013. Whereas Image of the Black Child in Children’s Fiction (1973), Telling Tales: The Pedagogy and Promise of African American Literature for Youth (1990), Domestic Abolitionism and Juvenile Literature, 1830–1865 (2003), Brown Gold: Milestones of African American Children’s Books, 1845–2002 (2004), Children’s Literature of the Harlem Renaissance (2004), Free within Ourselves: The Development of African American Children’s Literature (2007), Ebony Jr! The Rise, Fall, and Return of a Black Children’s Magazine (2008), and Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights (2011) all address individual genres and themes important to the history of African American children’s literature, not until Paula T. Connolly’s superb Slavery in American Children’s Literature, 1790–2010 have scholars received a historical study of the construction and depiction of slavery in American children’s literature. By situating her work within “the nexus of children’s literature and racial mythmaking,” this groundbreaking text provides a critical and rigorously researched survey of “the visual and verbal literary aesthetics of race making” across two hundred years of American children’s literature (2). Connolly chronologically presents her chapters, each divided further into three subsections in order to depict differing and often competing discourses of slavery within each of her five periods. The first two chapters cover the antebellum and Civil War periods of American history. In chapter 1, “Slavery Debates for Children, 1790–1865: Abolitionist Responses,” Connolly addresses three categories of abolitionist responses: radical, moderate, and conservative. Radical abolitionist texts were generally published by abolitionist organizations and presented a “nonnegotiable view of slavery as an unquestionably cruel system under which people suffered” (15). For instance, Noah Webster’s The Little Reader’s Assistant (1790), the earliest text of radical abolitionism, aimed to inspire young, white readers to active abolitionism by condemning slavery, depicting its violence, focusing on enslaved children, and asserting the child reader’s responsibility to fight against such injustices. Yet by providing paradigms of white heroism, these texts remain radical only when compared to less progressive texts. Moderate abolitionist literature, such as Samuel Goodrich’s Peter Parley books, offer a more geographically and emotionally distanced presentation of slavery, suggesting that such cruelties existed outside of the United States and that a slave could be happy with the right master (36). Conservative abolitionist literature, including William Taylor Adams’s Hatchie, the Guardian Slave (1853) and John Townsend Trowbridge’s Cudjo’s Cave (1864), advocates a gradualist approach to abolition by emphasizing the supposed danger of immediate and total emancipation on white Americans. This literature encouraged child readers to help educate—not liberate—slaves of white values. Further, implicit in all three tiers of abolitionist children’s literature is a hierarchy of white characters that remained prevalent throughout the next two centuries of depictions of slavery in children’s literature. Chapter 2, “Slavery Debates for Children, 1830–1865: Proslavery Responses,” explores the proslavery refutation of abolitionist children’s literature through its representation of the idyll plantation and instruction of management. After reminding readers of the “Northerners who agreed with slavery” and how “pockets of rebellion by white citizens—such as in Jones County, Mississippi—revealed violent disagreements about slavery and secession,” [End Page 1191] Connolly explains in what manner “Plantation Stories” idealized the plantation as a protected and harmonious place of civility (52). For instance, The Rose Bud (1832–1833), the first children’s magazine published in the South, established how such stories would encourage proper slave management. Described as the most popular genre of Southern children’s literature, “Proslavery Adventures,” such as Francis Robert Goulding’s Robert and Harold; or, The Young Marooners on the Florida Coast (1852) offered a Robinson Crusoe-like tale for white children of slave holding families. These proslavery novels offered a counter point to the heroic, black slaves embodied by Douglass in Heroic Slave and George in Uncle Tom’s Cabin by revisioning slavery as play. Deserted islands function as microcosms of slavery where young characters and readers are assured...

Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights. By Robin Bernstein. New York: New York University Press, 2011; 318 pp.; illustrations. $79.00 cloth, $24.00 paper, e-book available

<i>Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights.</i> By Robin Bernstein. New York: New York University Press, 2011; 318 pp.; illustrations. $79.00 cloth, $24.00 paper, e-book available

The Cambridge Companion to African American Theatre. Edited by Harvey Young. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012; pp. xix + 291, illustrated. $94 cloth, $30.99 paper, $25 e-book. - The Problem of the Color[blind]: Racial Transgression and the Politics of Black Performance. By Brandi Wilkins Catanese. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011; pp. viii + 214. $75 cloth, $28.95 paper,

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Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights

Book Review| April 01 2014 Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights Bernstein, Robin, Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights, New York: New York University Press, 2011 Matthew Davis Matthew Davis Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Genre (2014) 47 (1): 103–109. https://doi.org/10.1215/00166928-2392384 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Matthew Davis; Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights. Genre 1 April 2014; 47 (1): 103–109. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00166928-2392384 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsGenre Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2014 by University of Oklahoma2014 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

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 Jasmine Nichole Cobb (bio) Bernstein, Robin. Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights. New York: New York UP, 2011. The body of scholarship on racist imagery and resistant popular cultures of the nineteenth century organizes a well-covered terrain and leaves little room for innovation. Works like Saidiya Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection (1997) and Daphne Brooks’s Bodies in Dissent (2006) thoroughly deconstruct the residues of slavery in U.S. visual, literary, and theatrical cultures. Robin Bernstein’s Racial Innocence joins a conversation on “racial Americana” that turns scholarly attention toward the material culture vestiges of slavery, and their relevance to childhood, in order to offer a fresh approach to national fixations on racial difference.1 This work aims to explore the racial entanglements of childhood that resulted from slavery and that remained relevant through the Civil Rights era. Covering extensive ground, the text uses children’s dolls, storybooks, cartoons, and stage performance ephemera to explore the racialization of childhood in the mid-nineteenth century, and its perpetuation into twentieth-century questions about African American enfranchisement. Specifically, Bernstein argues that “performance, both on stage and, especially, in everyday life, was the vehicle by which childhood suffused, gave power to, and crucially shaped these racial projects” (4). Bernstein has authored other books on theater and on children’s literature, but combines that expertise in Racial Innocence to analyze the performance of childhood on stage, as well as the childhood performances initiated by material culture. Bernstein argues, “children and childhood give body to each other” through performance and reveal how slavery’s remnants of racialization dispersed into U.S. conceptualizations of the child, and by consequence, humanity and citizenship (22). Racial Innocence makes these claims across five chapters (two are theoretical, which she uses for critique in the remaining chapters) and a close reading of approximately forty images. In chapter 1, Bernstein explains the divergent paths of racial childhood for Blacks and Whites. Whereas abolitionists worked to reveal the pain of slavery inflicted on Black adults, Bernstein illustrates the ways in which this agenda failed to attend to Black children in an adequate manner. Instead, Black children, represented in visions of the pickaninny, became the location for slavery’s concept of Blacks as insensate. In the second half of the nineteenth century, “pain functioned as a wedge that split childhood innocence,” distinguishing Black children from White children, creating “racial innocence” through “the use of childhood to make political projects appear innocuous, natural, and therefore justified” (33). Foregrounding divergent paths of racial childhood, Bernstein goes on to read the ways in which materials like books, toys, and dolls do not simply evidence these concepts, but invite performances of childhood in line with concepts of racial difference. [End Page 461] Bernstein lays out the ways in which a study of childhood performance is a difficult thing to trace because of its fleeting nature, and thus a key intervention of this text is her organization of the “scriptive thing” as a theory of play and a research methodology. In chapter 2, Bernstein describes this approach at the intersection of archives and repertoires, at the juncture of narrative documentations and embodied knowledge of past performances, where “scriptive things” connect the two.2 Bernstein argues that scholars can engage things for how they “script” behavior, to look at material culture for how it “prompts meaningful bodily behaviors” (71). Unpacking the example of an Uncle Tom’s Cabin handkerchief, Bernstein demonstrates the way in which scholars can ask questions about the behaviors invited by material cultures to think through meanings in context. While consumers used other kinds of bandanas for blowing one’s nose or adorning a jacket pocket, things like the antislavery handkerchief scripted performances of sentimentality by inviting the owner to dab the tears she cried for poor Eva (10). Bernstein follows this line of thinking through three critical chapters, using her theory of “scriptive things” to critique performances of childhood invited by a diverse array of items associated with Uncle Tom, Raggedy Ann, and Black dolls. In chapter 3, Bernstein connects material culture and performance to...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 Adopting America: Childhood, Kinship, and National Identity in Literature

Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights Adopting America: Childhood, Kinship, and National Identity in Literature

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

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

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...

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 (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...

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. Robin Bernstein. New York and London: New York University Press, 2011. $9.99 (Kindle edition).

<i>Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights</i>. Robin Bernstein. New York and London: New York University Press, 2011. $9.99 (Kindle edition).