Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights (America and the Long 19th Century, 16) - Hardcover

Bernstein, Robin

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 081478707X ISBN 13: 9780814787076

Publisher: NYU Press, 2011

Synopsis

Winner, Outstanding Book Award, Association for Theatre in Higher Education
Winner, Grace Abbott Best Book Award, Society for the History of Children and Youth
Winner, Book Award, Children's Literature Association
Winner, Lois P. Rudnick Book Prize, New England American Studies Association
Winner, IRSCL Award, International Research Society for Children's Literature
Runner-Up, John Hope Franklin Publication Prize, American Studies Association
Honorable Mention, Book Award, Society for the Study of American Women Writers

In Racial Innocence, Robin Bernstein argues that the concept of "childhood innocence" has been central to U.S. racial formation since the mid-nineteenth century. Children--white ones imbued with innocence, black ones excluded from it, and others of color erased by it--figured pivotally in sharply divergent racial agendas from slavery and abolition to antiblack violence and the early civil rights movement.
Racial Innocence takes up a rich archive including books, toys, theatrical props, and domestic knickknacks which she analyzes as "scriptive things" that invite or prompt historically-located practices while allowing for resistance and social improvisation. Integrating performance studies with literary and visual analysis, Bernstein offers singular readings of theatrical productions from blackface minstrelsy to Uncle Tom's Cabin to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz; literary works by Joel Chandler Harris, Harriet Wilson, and Frances Hodgson Burnett; material culture including Topsy pincushions, Uncle Tom and Little Eva handkerchiefs, and Raggedy Ann dolls; and visual texts ranging from fine portraiture to advertisements for lard substitute. Throughout, Bernstein shows how "innocence" gradually became the exclusive province of white children--until the Civil Rights Movement succeeded not only in legally desegregating public spaces, but in culturally desegregating the concept of childhood itself.

About this title

About the Author:

Robin Bernstein is Professor of African and African American Studies and Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University.  Her previous books include Cast Out: Queer Lives in Theater.  Visit her online at scholar.harvard.edu/robinbernstein/home.

Review:

"A powerhouse of a book. . . [an] intervention of the highest order. Racial Innocencewill quickly become a cornerstone text in many fields, ranging from critical race theory and performance studies to American cultural history and childhood studies." (Douglas A. Jones Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism)

"Racial Innocence is an invaluable contribution. . . it enlivens a diverse constellation of evidence, making it an exemplary model for any interdisciplinary project of similarly ambitious scope." (Meredith A. Bak Journal of Popular Culture)

"Revelatory." (Anna Mae Duane MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the US)

"Vibrant. . . [An] exemplary model of interdisciplinary scholarship." (Kristen B. Proehl African American Review)

"A provocative, insightful, and bold text that demonstrates how important the field of cultural studies is and can be." (Jenny Wills Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures)

"A paradigm-shifting study of major significance." (Judie Newman The Journal of American Studies)

"Bernstein's text unfolds with a readerly pleasure few scholarly books achieve, as she offers stunning close readings while steadily constructing a compelling narrative arc built upon each piece of evidence." (Legacy)

"Groundbreaking . . . radical." (Lisa Merrill Theatre Annual)

"Nineteenth and early twentieth-century material culture comes alive in Robin Bernsteins brilliant study of the racialized and gendered ideologies that shape, inform and continue to haunt notions of American childhood into the present day. Through imaginative and masterfully innovative archival research, Bernstein shows how representations of childhood and childs play are integral to the making of whiteness and blackness and citizenship in this country. Racial Innocence is a groundbreaking book that for the first time illuminates the powerful and critical connections between constructions of girlhood, racial formations and American popular culture." (Daphne Brooks,Princeton University)

"You will never look at a Raggedy Ann doll the same way again." (Rebecca Onion Backlist)

About this edition

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 081478707X
• ISBN 13: 9780814787076
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 318