Racial Innocence

Robin Bernstein

ISBN 10: 0814787088 / ISBN 13: 9780814787083

Published by New York University Press, 2011

About this Item

Shows how the concepts of childhood innocence fundamentally shaped the history of race in the US Series: America and the Long 19th Century. Num Pages: 318 pages, 52 b&w illustrations, 2 tables. BIC Classification: 1KBB; JFSL3; JFSP1. Category: (P) Professional & Vocational. Dimension: 156 x 229 x 18. Weight in Grams: 526. . 2011. Paperback. . . . . Books ship from the US and Ireland.

Seller Inventory # V9780814787083

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Racial Innocence
• Publisher: New York University Press
• Publication Date: 2011
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0814787088
• ISBN 13: 9780814787083
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

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.


Bernstein 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 the Author

Robin Bernstein is Professor of African and African American Studies and of 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.