tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23398211589238151052024-03-06T15:03:10.099-05:00Racial InnocenceAll the latest news about Robin Bernstein's new book, Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil RightsRobin Bernsteinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13779213058386648690noreply@blogger.comBlogger51125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2339821158923815105.post-30529936662007746582017-04-16T13:16:00.001-04:002017-04-16T13:16:40.302-04:00I am a Connoisseur of Academic AdviceI am a connoisseur--or perhaps a connoisseuse?--of academic advice. I read it avidly and judge it fiercely. I <a href="http://scholar.harvard.edu/robinbernstein/pages/grad-students">curate</a> it, share it, and synthesize it. And now, I'm writing it. My first advice column, "<a href="http://www.chronicle.com/article/The-Art-of-No-/239508">The Art of 'No</a>,'" was published in March in the <a href="http://www.chronicle.com/"><i>Chronicle of Higher Education</i></a> (with reprints in <a href="https://chroniclevitae.com/">Chronicle Vitae</a> and then, on April 14, in the <a href="http://www.chronicle.com/issue/2017/04-14">print version of the Chronicle</a>). Since I've read and loved the <i>Chron </i>for over two decades, this publication meant a lot to me. <a href="https://theactivistclassroom.wordpress.com/about/">Kim Solga</a> kindly <a href="https://theactivistclassroom.wordpress.com/2017/03/22/on-the-art-of-saying-no-redux/">blogged </a>about it, and a journalist named Virginia Galt interviewed me for an <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/careers/career-advice/life-at-work/just-say-no-the-key-to-effective-time-management/article34695092/">article </a>that ran in the <i>Globe and Mail</i>. People have told me that the column has been helpful to them, and I couldn't be more glad. <br />
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My follow-up column, "You Are Not a Public Utility," is set to run soon in the <i>Chron</i>. I'll post here when it's available. And I hope to publish more of this kind of work. <br />
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I've benefited so much from good advice--especially from people like <a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/Advice_for_New_Faculty_Members.html?id=WUkkAQAAMAAJ">Robert Boice</a>, <a href="http://www.philnel.com/tag/advice/">Philip Nel</a>, <a href="https://matthewprattguterl.com/general-advice/">Matthew Pratt Guterl</a>, <a href="http://www.wendybelcher.com/">Wendy Belcher</a>, and <a href="http://theprofessorisin.com/">Karen Kelsky</a>. I truly appreciate the value of this genre of writing, and I'm thrilled to contribute to it. It's wonderful to be able to pass on some of what I've learned.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiW5W3dbezL0B_N7T2ROsS7Li0E1By2xGJoEam_taf12Fxgyen1hclJ4m2nWHenwjWLyvLnTd6JiNiG4D1qW86EhzVale0bAjUqnaKk1g-rx1kuklIneL5Lc5mrHjwzgjph3vnKAInrotac/s1600/Art+of+No+image.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiW5W3dbezL0B_N7T2ROsS7Li0E1By2xGJoEam_taf12Fxgyen1hclJ4m2nWHenwjWLyvLnTd6JiNiG4D1qW86EhzVale0bAjUqnaKk1g-rx1kuklIneL5Lc5mrHjwzgjph3vnKAInrotac/s320/Art+of+No+image.jpg" width="320" height="213" /></a></div>Robin Bernsteinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13779213058386648690noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2339821158923815105.post-50394660934906735042016-05-19T09:40:00.002-04:002016-05-20T10:01:38.739-04:00What I've Learned: Three Steps to Designing Powerful SyllabiMany grad students are daunted by the challenge of writing a syllabus for the first time. In my <a href="http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/robinbernstein/files/wgs_2000_proseminar_2016_bernstein.pdf?m=1452442030">Graduate Proseminar</a> in Studies in Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard, I teach a three-step approach to creating powerful and effective syllabi.<br />
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1. Ask Two Questions<br />
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Teachers can design great syllabi by beginning with two key questions:<br />
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Who are my students?<br />
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And what do I want them to learn?<br />
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The first question requires a professor to think honestly about the students who exist--the real students who are most likely to show up in class, human and messy, with strengths and challenges, areas of knowledge and ignorance, skills and clumsiness, questions and ideas. Real people. Not the ones who "should" exist, not the half-remembered fantasies of how students "used" to be. <br />
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The second question pointedly revises the one that too many teachers start with: What do I want to teach? Some teachers leap to decisions about what books they want to assign or what topics they want to cover. This approach is backwards: it sweeps aside the needs of the real students in favor of attending to the teacher's needs and interests. The better question--What do I want my students to learn?--forces the teacher to identify real students' pedagogical needs and the ways in which this specific course can advance some of those needs<br />
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This second question also helps teachers to think about multiple forms of learning that can occur in a classroom. A teacher may want students to gain knowledge and skills, of course, but she may also want students to learn habits of mind or patterns of behavior. In my graduate proseminar, for example, I want my students to learn how to work at a constant, intensely challenging pace--but without rushing. I therefore require significant written assignments almost every week, and the course has no final paper or project. The course’s structure precludes an end-of-semester frenzy and instead requires students to work at a steady, constant rhythm--and that rhythm is itself exactly what I want the students to learn. Which leads me to the second rule of powerful syllabi:<br />
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2. Design "Making" Assignments to Achieve Pedagogical Goals<br />
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Anchor your pedagogical goals in assignments in which students make something specific and defined--such as a piece of writing, an oral presentation, a performance, a website--or, in the case of my grad students, a syllabus! These assignments' <i>structure </i>should be geared to advance the learning goals you have already identified.<br />
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"Making" assignments are the most important aspect of the course, because they are the primary machinery by which your students will learn what you want them to learn. Whenever possible, every pedagogical goal should be anchored in "making" assignments, and every "making" assignment should connect to your pedagogical goals in ways that are <i>legible to the students</i>. No secret agendas!<br />
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3. Organize Everything Else in the Syllabus around Your Pedagogical Goals<br />
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<i>After </i>you've designed your "making" assignments, the next step is to assign "taking in" tasks such as reading (or viewing a play or film, or listening to music, or whatever else is appropriate to the course). "Taking in" is not separate from "making," of course--powerful syllabi <i>integrate </i>all aspects of students' work. Reading should connect logically with writing, and everything should align visibly with the course's core pedagogical goals. <br />
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It's obvious to most teachers that reading assignments should reflect pedagogical goals. What's less obvious is that course policies should also do so. When my graduate proseminar students created syllabi this semester, they excelled in identifying pedagogical goals and integrating them with "making" and "taking in" assignments. But I noticed something surprising that recurred across many of the syllabi: harsh penalties for late papers or unexcused absences. For example, some docked a paper a full letter grade for each day overdue, or lowered the semester grade by a half or even full letter for every unexcused absence. <br />
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I responded by inviting my students to examine the relationship between those penalties and the course's pedagogical goals. If a serious pedagogical goal is to train students in punctuality, community-building, responsibility, or professionalism, then such penalties make sense. Sometimes one of the most important things a teacher can teach is the importance of showing up and being prepared. But if that's not a central pedagogical goal, what is the reason behind harsh penalties for lateness or unexcused absence? <br />
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I wondered what feelings lie beneath these penalties. Sometimes teachers are strict because they feel insecure, defensive, or threatened. These feelings are normal. The problem is that the more a teacher builds them into the structure of a syllabus, the more the syllabus is teacher-focused rather than student-focused. In other words, when professors include something in the syllabus to attend primarily to our needs, we draw energy away from students' needs. Sometimes that's appropriate: for example, it's a poor idea for professors to assign more written assignments than they can reasonably read or grade. It may be in the students' best interests to write five short papers over the course of a semester, but if the reality is that you cannot grade that much student writing, then you should not set that many assignments. So the tension between students' pedagogical needs and teachers' human needs is always present, and it's not a bad thing. But it becomes a bad thing if a professor's needs surface in an un-examined way in a syllabus.<br />
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So I'm not saying professors should never impose strict or even harsh penalties for late papers or excessive absence (there can be good reasons for doing so: as my friend <a href="http://english.ucdavis.edu/people/esfreema">Elizabeth Freeman</a> points out to me, if you are teaching large lecture courses on a quarter system, every late paper snarls the pedagogical flow and overburdens the Teaching Assistants). Rather, I suggest that professors should be honest with ourselves about why we're doing so--and whether that choice furthers a course's pedagogical goals or attempts to manage an emotional need.<br />
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The bottom line: your syllabi will be most powerful when you lead with the questions, "Who are my students? And what do I want them to learn?"--and then structure your "making" assignments around those goals, and <i>then </i>do the same with all other aspects of the syllabus, from the reading assignments to the policies on lateness. Your needs, including your emotional needs, <i>are </i>important. And they should figure in your syllabi in a thoughtful, self-conscious way--all the while putting real students first.<br />
Robin Bernsteinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13779213058386648690noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2339821158923815105.post-52218694332074772972015-06-21T10:31:00.001-04:002015-06-21T11:54:42.514-04:00Racial Innocence Suffuses a White Confessed KillerThe <i>New York Times</i> has published <a href="https://twitter.com/britrbennett">Brit Bennett</a>'s important commentary on the #CharlestonShooting in the context of the <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/19/magazine/white-terrorism-is-as-old-as-america.html?_r=0">history of white terrorists in the United States</a>. The <i>Times </i>appends to Bennett's essay this photograph of the accused killer in a bullet-proof vest.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgeAULMO2f7ViscMqXaH0kyKHo8iSFmxFwUumIYoRjdFubSUMxdJqyVTJ9IMoij1uHt_kPON3hUz8PfB2a6lG7K_OglEiSFhPBP2PgrDpCzrlXLjZEe1dINkheWDd7I9G1S_hB9ds-GPRS5/s1600/Dylann+Storm+Roof.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgeAULMO2f7ViscMqXaH0kyKHo8iSFmxFwUumIYoRjdFubSUMxdJqyVTJ9IMoij1uHt_kPON3hUz8PfB2a6lG7K_OglEiSFhPBP2PgrDpCzrlXLjZEe1dINkheWDd7I9G1S_hB9ds-GPRS5/s400/Dylann+Storm+Roof.jpg" /></a></div>Photo credit: Chuck Burton/Associated Press<br />
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This photograph tells a story: that the white <a href="http://www.theroot.com/articles/news/2015/06/dylann_roof_s_roomate_shooter_had_been_planning_something_like_that_for.html">confessed </a>killer is in danger of being shot... by whom? Who is the implied threat in this image? Dylann Storm Roof claimed that he <a href="http://www.theroot.com/articles/news/2015/06/the_9_victims_of_the_charleston_south_carolina_church_massacre.html">murdered nine worshippers</a> in the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church because black people threaten whites: "<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/19/us/charleston-church-shooting.html">You are raping our women and taking over the country</a>." This image in the NYTimes reinforces that perspective. This is what happens when white supremacism saturates a culture: even when a white person massacres black church-goers, the story is visually re-told as one in which black people threaten whites--who need and deserve protection.Robin Bernsteinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13779213058386648690noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2339821158923815105.post-92098321409635755542014-11-11T21:01:00.000-05:002014-11-12T11:09:36.312-05:00My Philosophy re: Book PrizesI just said this to a friend, but I think it's worth sharing generally: it's my philosophy about book awards. I believe that first-time academic authors need to make sure their books are nominated for as many awards as possible. The reason is that the point of a nomination is <b>not <i></i></b>just to win. Too many people think that if you win, you win, and if you don't win, you lose. That's completely wrong. Whether you win or not, a nomination creates an opportunity for a whole range of positive effects: your book is guaranteed to be read by at least two or three scholars in your general field, and regardless of whether it wins, those people could assign it in their courses, review it, recommend it to students and colleagues, cite it, remember it when you apply for a job... the list of positive possibilities just goes on and on. Prize nominations are a key way to jump-start a reading community for your book. And on top of all that, you could win! <br />
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Sometimes people don't nominate their books for awards because they don't think their books could win. This negative self-assessment often entwines with the politics of gender, race, sexuality, and other categories of identity. But my perspective is that <i><b>winning is beside the point</b></i>--so the question of whether you have a "chance" of winning is irrelevant. <b>If your book is good enough to get published, it's good enough to be read</b>--and that is exactly what will happen when you nominate it for a prize.<br />
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I do understand that nominations can be costly, but I believe it's worth the expense for both publishers and authors. Nominations for many awards for 2014 books are now open... so get your book out there!Robin Bernsteinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13779213058386648690noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2339821158923815105.post-32160318246103860002014-08-31T10:13:00.002-04:002014-09-10T08:30:32.979-04:00Can Black Children be "Angels"? The History behind the New York Times Insult to Michael BrownOn August 24, John Eligon wrote in the <i>New York Times</i> that Michael Brown, the unarmed 18-year-old gunned down by police in Ferguson, Missouri, was "<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/25/us/michael-brown-spent-last-weeks-grappling-with-lifes-mysteries.html?_r=1">no angel</a>." The full paragraph read:<br />
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<blockquote>Michael Brown, 18, due to be buried on Monday, was no angel, with public records and interviews with friends and family revealing both problems and promise in his young life. Shortly before his encounter with Officer Wilson, the police say he was caught on a security camera stealing a box of cigars, pushing the clerk of a convenience store into a display case. He lived in a community that had rough patches, and he dabbled in drugs and alcohol. He had taken to rapping in recent months, producing lyrics that were by turns contemplative and vulgar. He got into at least one scuffle with a neighbor.</blockquote><br />
Appropriately, this slur received<a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/08/25/ny-times-michael-brown-no-angel_n_5708619.html?utm_hp_ref=tw"> widespread criticism</a> and caused many readers to <a href="http://www.ibtimes.com/mike-brown-no-angel-profile-new-york-times-outrages-readers-drives-subscription-1668810#.VAM7edT5tTs.facebook">cancel their subscriptions</a> to the <i>Times</i>. The police's claim that Brown was a suspect in the robbery at the time of the shooting has now been <a href="http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/ferguson-police-name-michael-brown">discredited</a>, and the <i>Times</i>' implication that a teenager deserved to die because he lived in a "rough" neighborhood and engaged in typical teenage behaviors such as rapping, scuffling with one neighbor, and dabbling with drugs and alcohol is the deepest of insults to African American worth. It suggests, as many have pointed out, that black lives don't matter.<br />
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Soon after the <i>Times </i>article appeared, <i>Vanity Fair</i> published <a href="http://www.vanityfair.com/contributors/kia-makarechi">Kia Makarechi</a>'s important analysis of the <i>Times</i>'s use of the phrase "no angel." In this <a href="http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2014/08/michael-brown-no-angel-new-york-times">article</a>, Makarechi showed a pattern in which the <i>Times </i>used this term to refer to white people who were the most heinous of criminals and black people who were innocent victims of crimes, entertainers, or criminal suspects. Specifically, Makarechi showed that <br />
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<blockquote>A sample of the white folks the Times has called “no angel” includes infamous mobsters, murderers, a pornographer, and a Nazi. Black Americans described similarly by the paper include a basketball player, a singer, criminal suspects, and unarmed men killed by white people.</blockquote><br />
In response to the criticism, <i>Times </i>editor Margaret Sullivan wrote that the phrase "no angel" was </i><a href="http://publiceditor.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/08/25/an-ill-chosen-phrase-no-angel-brings-a-storm-of-protest/?_php=true&_type=blogs&smid=tw-share&_r=0">"ill-chosen" and "regrettable."</a> Eligon said, "<a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/08/25/ny-times-michael-brown-mistake-john-eligon_n_5711147.html">I understand the concerns, and I get it</a>."<br />
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Sullivan's and Eligon's wishy-washy half-apologies are not just inadequate: by treating the use of the phrase as an isolated incident, Sullivan and Eligon ignore the long history of white assertions that black children cannot be angels. The history that the <i>Vanity Fair</i> article exposed is just the tip of the iceberg.<br />
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Shortly before the Civil War, many white writers--especially abolitionists--began anxiously debating whether black children who died could become angels, and if so, whether they needed to become white first. As I write in my book, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Racial-Innocence-Performing-American-Childhood/dp/0814787088/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1325513613&sr=8-1">Racial Innocence</a>, the 1862 abolitionist story "Poor Little Violet," by Lynde Palmer, included a very disturbing scene in which Violet, an enslaved girl, discusses death and angelhood with a white slaveholding girl named Carrie. Violet asks,<br />
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<blockquote>“[W]hen we goes to Canaan, that old Sambo sings about, may I be your little slave then, Miss Carrie, ’cause you’s allus so kind?”<br />
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“I don’t think there will be any slaves there,” said Carrie, slowly, pondering over the matter.<br />
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“Why, what will the black people do, then?” cried Violet, with curious round eyes.<br />
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“Maybe,” replied Carrie hesitatingly, “maybe there won’t be any black people—you know, Violet, our bodies are covered up in the ground,”—Violet shivered,—“but our souls go to heaven, and they must all be white.”<br />
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“All of ’em?” asked Violet, eagerly.<br />
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“Yes, mamma told me that no soul can go till it is washed white in Jesus’ blood.”<br />
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“And can my soul be white?” whispered Violet.<br />
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“Yes,” said Carrie, “if you ask God.” (<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Racial-Innocence-Performing-American-Childhood/dp/0814787088/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1325513613&sr=8-1">Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights</a>, p. 59)</blockquote><br />
The <i>Times</i>'s reference to Michael Brown as "no angel" is so deeply hurtful because it extends a historical libel that African Americans, and African American children in particular, cannot be innocent. As the slaveholder Carrie tells Violet, to be an angel is to be white. And in this white-authored text--<i>which was intended to critique slavery</i>--a black girl joyously receives this information with hope that she can shed her blackness, become white, and become an angel.<br />
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What is at stake in the phrase "no angel" is the racial distribution of innocence. By calling Michael Brown "no angel," the <i>Times </i>excluded an African American teenager from the realm of innocence. And by doing so, the newspaper of record reserved that assumption of innocence for the white policeman who killed him.<br />
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Robin Bernsteinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13779213058386648690noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2339821158923815105.post-59199534647768838672013-09-05T07:49:00.001-04:002013-09-05T07:49:05.277-04:00Second Annual Childhood Studies LectureI'm giving the Second Annual Childhood Studies Lecture at Rutgers-Camden on Thursday, September 19. The talk is hosted by the <a href="http://childhood.camden.rutgers.edu/">Department of Childhood Studies</a>, the first department in the US to offer a PhD in childhood studies. I'm looking forward to engaging with the wonderful students and faculty in this ground-breaking department.<br />
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In the talk, titled “Trayvon Martin and So Many More: Racial Innocence Today," I'm going to address the ways in which racial innocence continues to affect children and adults today--and the ways in which racial innocence has changed in crucial ways in the past fifty years. Rutgers Today posted a nice news release about the talk: <a href="http://news.rutgers.edu/news/rutgers-host-second-annual-childhood-studies-lecture-%E2%80%9Ctrayvon-martin-and-so-many-more-racial/20130904#.Uihsin-Jtf0">Rutgers to Host Second Annual Childhood Studies Lecture, “Trayvon Martin and So Many More: Racial Innocence Today."</a> If you're going to be in the Camden/Philadelphia area, I hope you'll come to the talk!Robin Bernsteinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13779213058386648690noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2339821158923815105.post-16396747904589893542013-08-13T13:33:00.000-04:002013-08-13T13:37:41.814-04:00Full-page ad in PMLAI am overwhelmed by this full-page advertisement that NYU Press placed in the current issue of the PMLA, which arrived in my mailbox today.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhCGAUeMCNqBtn8xoCgZCjjSPOKlZfVfHTUT4VEyPD_XUA8QGdTORS4YP7V5MYK45o_jHBWPZRvWGQQWK92ls-QD1KwFbexgwCwYWE3BdPiOIQiIV23PSwqAGGL0HE8LCPM75ReBftkym4p/s1600/PMLA+128+3+May+2013+848.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhCGAUeMCNqBtn8xoCgZCjjSPOKlZfVfHTUT4VEyPD_XUA8QGdTORS4YP7V5MYK45o_jHBWPZRvWGQQWK92ls-QD1KwFbexgwCwYWE3BdPiOIQiIV23PSwqAGGL0HE8LCPM75ReBftkym4p/s640/PMLA+128+3+May+2013+848.jpg" /></a></div><br />
PMLA 128.1 (May 2013): 848<br />
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The <a href="http://www.mla.org/pmla">PMLA</a>, established 1884, is the journal of the Modern Language Association. Each issue reaches about 29,000 members of the MLA plus 2,000 libraries.<br />
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Sometimes all you can say is "Wow."<br />
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Thank you, Eric Zinner and NYU Press, for your ongoing, simply stunning support for this book. Robin Bernsteinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13779213058386648690noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2339821158923815105.post-77891986547650293422013-08-05T14:14:00.000-04:002013-08-05T14:14:03.086-04:00"Arresting... shows how the hegemonic project of white supremacy takes constant reinforcement in popular forms to naturalize racist practices on the ground"<a href="http://ethnicstudies.ucr.edu/people/faculty/brown/">Jayna Brown</a>, author of the brilliant, award-winning <a href="http://www.amazon.com/books/dp/0822341573"><i>Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern</i></a>, has reviewed <i>Racial Innocence</i> in the current issue of <a href="http://callaloo.tamu.edu/"><i>Callaloo: A Journal of African Diaspora Arts and Letters</i></a>. She wrote:<br />
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<blockquote>“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. . . . 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. . . . I had a strong response to these assaulting, violent images. The sheer number of the book’s examples began to accumulate on my back, and behind my eyes, as I read. A few of these toxic images went a long way in my case, and I found myself yearning for some kind of black [']answer back,' as my students call it, to counteract the symbolic torture and immolation of black children. But perhaps the very repetition of such images, things, and acts underlines a crucial utility of the book, as it shows how the hegemonic project of white supremacy takes constant reinforcement in popular forms to naturalize racist practices on the ground. Black resistance is the absent presence that threatens such naturalization. The last chapter opens with the ‘answer back’ I needed. She relates the childhood recollections of Daisy Turner, who as a little girl actively resisted a teacher’s scripted racism. The teacher planned a school pageant, in which every child was to represent a different country while holding a doll, dressed in the same clothes, which was meant to represent that nation. Each child was given a poem to read. Daisy Turner was given a black doll named Dinah, representing ‘the nation’ of Africa, and a matching poem. Daisy Turner refused to read the script given her by her teacher, and improvised her own recitation.” Jayna Brown, <i>Callaloo </i>36.2 (Spring 2013): pp. 482-485.<br />
</blockquote><br />
When I was writing <i>Racial Innocence</i>, I was deeply conflicted about the violence I was representing. I worried that in describing violence against black dolls, I was replicating it and re-inflicting damage. At the same time, I needed to describe the violence in a way that took seriously the acts of white children and that held them accountable. A key point of my book is that the actions and material culture of white children have, over the past hundred and fifty years, been made to appear innocent. But they are not innocent. White children's violence against black dolls is real violence; it is not just "child's play." I wanted my book to rip the veil off of a century and a half of racial innocence, and to do so I had to expose violence. I tried to describe it in a simple, straightforward way that avoided, equally, sensationalism and trivialization. And I know that these descriptions have caused pain, as Jayna Brown describes.<br />
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I'm grateful that Brown recognizes the heart of my goal: I aimed to show "how the hegemonic project of white supremacy takes constant reinforcement in popular forms to naturalize racist practices on the ground." This is exactly what I wanted my book to demonstrate: the ongoing, always-forming-and-reforming historical relationship between the micro and the macro, between the seemingly innocent acts of individual children and the broadest structures of white supremacy. As Brown notes, white supremacy requires "constant reinforcement" to to continue to exist. In other words, white supremacy is fundamentally a lie, and the only way it can maintain any credibility at all is if it is constantly re-enacted "on the ground," as Brown puts it.<br />
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Brown's review prompted me to recall a passage from the Introduction to my dissertation:<br />
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<blockquote>As I wrote this dissertation, I frequently envisioned a machine capable of reversing gravity. I imagined a machine that could contain a space such as a room or a house and invert it, yet enable all objects within that space to function normally so that the people within the house could not sense that they were in fact upside-down. I imagined, in other words, a machine capable of convincing people that up was down and down was up. How much human genius would be necessary to invent a machine that could obscure the fundamental truth of gravity? How large would such a machine need to be? How much energy would it use? How much would it cost? How much constant effort, and from how many different populations, would be required to maintain this machine? What chaos would ensue if—or inevitably, when—a fly in the gears caused the machine to pause, even for a nanosecond, in its labor? And how would the upside-down people within the machine manage these intermittent episodes of chaos? <br />
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This imagined gravity-reversal machine provides the metaphor by which I understand white supremacy. White supremacist ideology was and is a tremendous, energy-gobbling machine that aims to convince all people within its influence of a fundamental falsehood: that people of color are essentially inferior to white people; that some of us are more and some of us are less human than others. Evidence against white people’s inherent superiority is and always has been abundantly available. . . . I wrote this dissertation because I wanted to understand machinery that could convince large numbers of people that a falsehood was true, that up was down and down was up, that some people are more human than others. I wanted to understand machinery that could manage abundant and assertive evidence—of gravity, of humanity—in such a way that that evidence did not shatter the illusions that the machine existed to construct. Childhood is one crucial gear—a “linchpin,” in Caroline Levander’s language—within the giant cultural machine of white supremacist ideology. This dissertation traces the teeth of that gear and shows how it performs within the cultural machinery of white supremacy.</blockquote><br />
May we all, like Daisy Turner, "answer back," throw down the props of white supremacy, and interrupt the constant, repeated acts--often banal, everyday behaviors that appear too minor to matter--that white supremacy depends on for its continuing, malignant existence. <br />
Robin Bernsteinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13779213058386648690noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2339821158923815105.post-2033627725207166572013-07-24T20:09:00.001-04:002013-07-24T20:28:59.242-04:00"Provocative, insightful, and bold"The current issue of <i><a href="http://www.jeunessejournal.ca/index.php/yptc">Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures</a></i> includes <a href="http://crytc.uwinnipeg.ca/wills.php">Jenny Wills'</a> terrific 13-page review--which toward the end bursts into a hybrid review/article in which Wills discusses contemporary subjects such as Barbie and Bratz dolls. Here are some highlights:<br />
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<blockquote>"<i>Racial Innocence</i> is a provocative, insightful, and bold text that demonstrates how important the field of cultural studies is and can be. Texts and topics are interwoven with poignant commentaries about race and identity in a way that insists that Bernstein's aruments are equally relevant to scholars interested in youth narratives and cultures as well as those of us working in critical race studies. . . . In <i>Racial Innocence</i>, however, we get more than a historically grounded cultural reading of print and non-print texts. We get a framework through which we might think through a variety of objects in terms of their implications on childhood, race, and innocence. Most importantly, Bernstein reminds us that sentimental, picturesque, and childhood playthings are not benign or devoid of serious racialized implications. This critical book goes beyond the specific texts that its author addresses, although Bernstein does move between subjects with finesse and expertise; Racial Innocence casts a much-needed spotlight onto so many of the artifacts from our daily environments." <a href="http://www.jeunessejournal.ca/index.php/yptc/article/view/181/138">Jenny Wills, "Scripted Violence, Scripted Deferral: Pre- and Post-Civil Rights <i>Racial Innocence</i>," <i>Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures</i> 5.1 (2013): 179-191.</a><br />
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</blockquote>Robin Bernsteinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13779213058386648690noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2339821158923815105.post-38838572083588932692013-07-21T17:11:00.000-04:002013-07-22T12:33:13.193-04:00Beautiful Black Dolls at the Shelburne MuseumMy partner and I recently visited the <a href="http://shelburnemuseum.org/">Shelburne Museum</a> in Vermont, which is a museum whose collections are distributed among 39 buildings on an estate near Lake Champlain. The core of the museum consists of the personal collections of heiress <a href="http://www.boston.com/travel/articles/2004/09/12/collectors_gene_yields_a_trove_of_americana_electra/">Electra Havemeyer Webb</a>, an aficionado of folk art and US material culture. The museum maintains collections in <a href="http://shelburnemuseum.org/collections/circus-figures-and-circus-posters/">circus figures and circus posters</a>, <a href="http://shelburnemuseum.org/collections/costumes-and-accessories/">clothing</a>, <a href="http://shelburnemuseum.org/collections/decorative-arts/">decorative arts</a>, <a href="http://shelburnemuseum.org/collections/folk-art/">folk art</a>, <a href="http://shelburnemuseum.org/collections/impressionist-paintings/">impressionist paintings</a>, <a href="http://shelburnemuseum.org/collections/quilts/">quilts</a>, <a href="http://shelburnemuseum.org/collections/tools/">tools</a>... and <a href="http://shelburnemuseum.org/collections/toys-dolls-dollhouses-automata/">dolls</a>. More than 400 of them. There's a whole book just about the doll collection.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJ7BQi1KFdPA9018KnKp-WbtEeDINcm7ZY-EFsRRWXGvAWDcDHPWZ-2-L7X6PsbBaxGWVqZfie-OSjgq2KBEdR80wqFafAxeK4nmIsUhISdMlair-yJ7YiKeRMxiXj6XVCsoAo0BqEOWgm/s1600/Dolls+of+the+Shelburne+Museum.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJ7BQi1KFdPA9018KnKp-WbtEeDINcm7ZY-EFsRRWXGvAWDcDHPWZ-2-L7X6PsbBaxGWVqZfie-OSjgq2KBEdR80wqFafAxeK4nmIsUhISdMlair-yJ7YiKeRMxiXj6XVCsoAo0BqEOWgm/s400/Dolls+of+the+Shelburne+Museum.jpg" /></a></div><br />
I saw hundreds of dolls at the Shelburne Museum, but the ones that really stay with me are these two:<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLqyVXIqBHOnTiREld0gtNozEsR7TDW2RkbQdXfhV0o3pL3vtQVlznArMSy2_Y7vXKmhYuUBsR7Ldi_ou2R7kP6cmyHEqrYLiqsBtZNwYqbdNNtlFDGrZJmTery_UzHtSoKtrSkC_ap2qn/s1600/Black+Dolls+2+Shelburne+Museum.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLqyVXIqBHOnTiREld0gtNozEsR7TDW2RkbQdXfhV0o3pL3vtQVlznArMSy2_Y7vXKmhYuUBsR7Ldi_ou2R7kP6cmyHEqrYLiqsBtZNwYqbdNNtlFDGrZJmTery_UzHtSoKtrSkC_ap2qn/s400/Black+Dolls+2+Shelburne+Museum.jpg" /></a></div><br />
These are very special, rare, beautiful dolls. To explain what makes them so interesting, I have to provide some background on dolls and race. <br />
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Dolls are political--not only in how they look, but also in how they feel, and how their materiality invites different kinds of play. In <i>Racial Innocence</i>, I wrote a lot about soft dolls that were designed to accommodate children's rough play. In the U.S. in the nineteenth century, a few small cottage industries began manufacturing such dolls. Small-scale makers of soft commercial dolls included <a href="http://www.izannahwalkerchronicles.com/p/who-is-izannah-walker.html">Izannah Walker</a>, <a href="http://connection.ebscohost.com/c/articles/9701290150/cloth-dolls-martha-chase">Martha Jenks Chase</a>, and Julia Jones Beecher, half-sister to Harriet Beecher Stowe. These white women all lived and worked in the postbellum North, but each manufactured at least one Plantation-style black doll. The Shelburne Museum owns, for example, this "mammy" doll manufactured by Martha Jenks Chase sometime between 1890 and 1900:<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjakav4xyZpmbXfMNwIy2psffr5n99tPn_1U6EPAsYOC2BWIfh6QpUQ4KBoB1aJwVS2WJoUb8wK-pO2oP6ao3mQO1yCDD9TP5qZOuJcdPfoqa1_cxpsIL6sqwpxL85J4fdqqVL2gQ5xq9F/s1600/Martha+Jenks+Chase+doll+Shelburne+Museum.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjakav4xyZpmbXfMNwIy2psffr5n99tPn_1U6EPAsYOC2BWIfh6QpUQ4KBoB1aJwVS2WJoUb8wK-pO2oP6ao3mQO1yCDD9TP5qZOuJcdPfoqa1_cxpsIL6sqwpxL85J4fdqqVL2gQ5xq9F/s400/Martha+Jenks+Chase+doll+Shelburne+Museum.jpg" /></a></div><br />
As I showed in my book, white nineteenth-century American children routinely subjected soft black dolls to enormous violence, and this violence was not only tolerated but encouraged by white adults who viewed such acts as racially innocent.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh3-JAb5Vy7YCLH5J7i6xKrNroPY7O5d2XNTG5LexZneetmN2Ix9Siexfrkd6LV9o6WdPeSmgMuWD5LdYQIBW8FK9ipHuEBGo2WDhIlVuzZ8YCPu6jROi-ndAgYYI71tP9j63DwaEOgQU9C/s1600/Myla+Perkins.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh3-JAb5Vy7YCLH5J7i6xKrNroPY7O5d2XNTG5LexZneetmN2Ix9Siexfrkd6LV9o6WdPeSmgMuWD5LdYQIBW8FK9ipHuEBGo2WDhIlVuzZ8YCPu6jROi-ndAgYYI71tP9j63DwaEOgQU9C/s200/Myla+Perkins.jpg" /></a></div>But there's another part of the story. Until the Civil Rights Movement, most commercial black dolls in the United States were caricatured and grotesque--but in Germany and France, a whole other vision of black people flourished. As Myla Perkins demonstrates in her two-volume masterpiece, <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/0891455159">Black Dolls: An Identification and Value Guide</a></i>, nineteenth-century dollmakers in France and Germany produced black dolls with the same molds they used to produce white dolls. The resulting black dolls were beautiful and non-caricatured. Unfortunately, because they were expensive imports, few African American children had access to them. In the U.S., most owners of these dolls were wealthy white girls.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgf6HsPC7H0g1sJGwWt5yWY9XAtjv0PwTRb4jwr4nsXtRluJbVPp8d6Bzz0htxe3t7LNWd1RuBo5Jd1gLKSdaCFuBRSBZbE61meZlvsOes9ShPNhv0-suG4zzAGltpA8nCx2BSZZ6K6zdcy/s1600/Black+Dolls+Shelburne+Museum.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgf6HsPC7H0g1sJGwWt5yWY9XAtjv0PwTRb4jwr4nsXtRluJbVPp8d6Bzz0htxe3t7LNWd1RuBo5Jd1gLKSdaCFuBRSBZbE61meZlvsOes9ShPNhv0-suG4zzAGltpA8nCx2BSZZ6K6zdcy/s200/Black+Dolls+Shelburne+Museum.jpg" /></a></div>Which brings us back to the white, wealthy Electra Havemeyer Webb, who added these beautiful dolls to her museum collection in 1951. These dolls are made of papier-mâché, and the Shelburne Museum identifies them as German, most likely produced in the 1850s (they were about a century old, then, when the museum acquired them). Unlike other German dolls which were produced with molds that were also used for white dolls, these dolls' faces and hair seem designed to represent the features of people of African descent. <br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxAmBrWRNpY2DHP4dQychVC5db654FQ8lZUdhpb4sebMQJ22hTByyzE5mcOlvHOBRXR72Nxj6j90ss4Gdz4oVlU5NhKiRP8L3QbMCeiTnSrlmV6DBLxbWfjptOr4bpNYbGmpJG-CRy6aXW/s1600/Black+Dolls+lady+closeup+Shelburne+Museum.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxAmBrWRNpY2DHP4dQychVC5db654FQ8lZUdhpb4sebMQJ22hTByyzE5mcOlvHOBRXR72Nxj6j90ss4Gdz4oVlU5NhKiRP8L3QbMCeiTnSrlmV6DBLxbWfjptOr4bpNYbGmpJG-CRy6aXW/s400/Black+Dolls+lady+closeup+Shelburne+Museum.jpg" /></a></div>The woman wears fine clothes and a bonnet, with detailing in the trim and buttons. While it is possible that the doll was intended to represent a servant, she does not present only that image (unlike the Martha Jenks Chase "mammy" doll and so many others like it). Her face is finely-drawn, realistic, and lovely. There is no hint of mockery.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhY1WBjuNM2ShdqF2hqx9XIKb6_NQtOsZoLWJiBVWg2Onl0veBgX6irMocQsfuk5m2J6C0u9UIo8QCi_U5Kj_caRLrKDdNggVeBVJTyCvtroPV7Hazr4kjNq1ZryJbeJBnnYsQMtNbAoGgX/s1600/Black+Dolls+gentleman+closeup+Shelburne+Museum.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhY1WBjuNM2ShdqF2hqx9XIKb6_NQtOsZoLWJiBVWg2Onl0veBgX6irMocQsfuk5m2J6C0u9UIo8QCi_U5Kj_caRLrKDdNggVeBVJTyCvtroPV7Hazr4kjNq1ZryJbeJBnnYsQMtNbAoGgX/s400/Black+Dolls+gentleman+closeup+Shelburne+Museum.jpg" /></a></div>The man is more ambiguous. He could represent a gentleman, or he could represent a servant in livery. Despite this ambiguity, this doll projects dignity. His clothing is, like the female doll's, carefully detailed in rich cloth. And the face beautifully represents African-diasporic features. In both cases, the large eyes and full cheeks reflect the period's conventions in doll-faces more than those of racist caricature.<br />
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<br />
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Papier-mâché is delicate. Unlike the soft cloth "mammy" doll, who was created to endure ritualistic abuse, these beautiful, dignified, realistic dolls scripted gentle, respectful play. <br />
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How did these fragile dolls survive a century in which the abuse of black dolls was the norm? Were they owned by black children? Did they survive because they were loved and treated tenderly? Did they survive because they were unloved and ignored? As with most dolls, it is difficult or even impossible to determine precisely what relationship they had with individual children and adults in the past. But we can imagine. And we can pause to look these dolls in the face and to remember: no matter how deeply the nineteenth century was steeped in racist imagery, counter-images existed. "Mammy" and other caricatures dominated black dolls prior to the Civil Rights Movement. And because they were so dominant, so denigrating, and so damaging, it is easy to forget that other kinds of dolls existed. But they did exist--and when we see them in places like the Shelburne Museum, we should pause, pay attention, and really take in the beauty before us.<br />
Robin Bernsteinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13779213058386648690noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2339821158923815105.post-5364646190957239502013-06-12T11:42:00.004-04:002013-06-12T11:43:55.691-04:00Winner, Award, International Research Society for Children's Literature (IRSCL)I am stunned to report that <i>Racial Innocence</i> has won the <a href="http://www.irscl.com/award.html">Award</a> from the <a href="http://www.irscl.com/index.html">International Research Society for Children's Literature (IRSCL)</a>. This biennial prize "honours a distinguished work of research into children's literary and cultural texts published in the two (calendar) years prior to the Congress at which it is awarded." My partner Maya and I are hoping to get to Maastricht, The Netherlands, for the <a href="http://irscl2013.com/">IRSCL Congress</a>, at which I'll receive the award.<br />
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Many, many thanks are due to <a href="http://ion.uwinnipeg.ca/~nodelman/">Perry Nodelman</a>, who nominated <i>Racial Innocence</i> for the IRSCL Award. Professor Nodelman is the distinguished author of <i><a href="http://ion.uwinnipeg.ca/~nodelman/Hidden.Adult.html">The Hidden Adult: Defining Children's Literature</a>, <a href="http://ion.uwinnipeg.ca/~nodelman/resources/index.htm">The Pleasures of Children's Literature</a></i> (with Mavis Reimer), and many other scholarly works, as well as several works of fiction. Professor Nodelman also maintains a <a href="http://binaryopposites.wordpress.com/">blog about salt and pepper shakers</a>--yes, salt and pepper shakers--and the ways in which these seemingly simple things open up deep questions about the nature of pairing, about race, gender, and sexuality, about kitsch and cuteness, about the acts of collecting, and about binary opposition.<br />
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The IRSCL Award will be the final one for <i>Racial Innocence</i>. The book is not nominated for any other prizes. It has been a simply amazing run: the book won the <a href="http://racialinnocence.blogspot.com/2013/05/winner-grace-abbott-best-book-award.html">Grace Abbott Best Book Award</a> from the Society for the History of Childhood and Youth, the <a href="http://racialinnocence.blogspot.com/2012/05/winner-of-outstanding-book-award-from.html">Outstanding Book Award</a> from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education, the <a href="http://racialinnocence.blogspot.com/2013/03/winner-childrens-lit-association-book.html">Children's Literature Association Book Award</a>, and the <a href="http://racialinnocence.blogspot.com/2012/10/winner-lois-p-rudnick-book-prize-new.html">Lois P. Rudnick Book Prize</a> from the New England American Studies Association. <i>Racial Innocence</i> was also runner-up for the <a href="http://racialinnocence.blogspot.com/2012/09/runner-up-for-asa-john-hope-franklin.html">John Hope Franklin Publication Prize</a> from the American Studies Association and honorable mention for the <a href="http://racialinnocence.blogspot.com/2012/09/honorable-mention-for-book-award-from.html">Book Award</a> from the Society for the Study of American Women Writers. As this list shows, the book has won awards in the fields of history, literature, theatre/performance, and American studies. <br />
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I am just overwhelmed by the recognition this book has received from prize committees, and of equal importance, from the people who have read the book and the professors who have assigned it in their graduate and undergraduate classes. Many, many thanks are due to New York University Press, specifically Assistant Director and Editor-in-Chief Eric Zinner and Assistant Editors Alicia Kirin Nadkarni and Ciara McLaughlin; to the book series editors David Kazanjian, Elizabeth McHenry, and Priscilla Wald; and to the amazing publicity team that has included, at different times, Mary Beth Jarrad, Betsy Steve, Trish Palao, Bernadette Blanco (who managed the book prize nominations!), Joe Gallagher, and Tom Sullivan. I thank all of them for their unwavering support for this book. And I thank the IRSCL, deeply, for <i>Racial Innocence</i>'s final award.<br />
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Robin Bernsteinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13779213058386648690noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2339821158923815105.post-58869261055285101382013-06-09T09:46:00.001-04:002013-06-09T09:46:27.451-04:00"Revelatory"Many thanks to <a href="http://english.uconn.edu/directory/faculty.php?id=26">Anna Mae Duane</a> for this splendid review in the current issue of <i>MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the US</i>:<br />
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<blockquote>"Revelatory. . . . Bernstein’s theoretically sophisticated and engagingly written book achieves what few scholarly texts have done: she allows us to see the familiar artifacts of childhood in ways we had not yet imagined. She has crafted a methodology finely calibrated to engage the problems of studying children’s culture that is equally useful for a wide range of scholars working in material, performance, and ethnic studies." Anna Mae Duane, <i>MELUS </i>38.2 (Summer 2013): 154-155</blockquote><br />
Duane's book, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Suffering-Childhood-Early-America-Violence/dp/0820333832/ref=la_B002XSW4GA_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1370637483&sr=1-1">Suffering Childhood in Early America: Violence, Race, and the Making of the Child Victim</a>, was a major source and inspiration to me as I wrote <i>Racial Innocence</i>. In her book, Duane argues that suffering crucially defined childhood in the US from the time of the early republic. This argument fundamentally shaped my thinking about popular culture during the second half of the nineteenth century, which systematically libeled African American children as unable to feel pain. If, as Duane argues, the ability to suffer defined American childhood, and if, as I observed, late-nineteenth century popular culture libeled black children as unable to suffer, then, I argued, popular culture gradually defined black youth out of childhood and excluded them from the right to protection. We still see the vestiges of this libel: even today, African American children are routinely subjected to abuses from which white children appear to deserve protection (as when, for example, <i>The Onion</i> used a most adult obscenity to describe black child actress Quvenzhané Wallis--a word that periodical never applied to any white child). In the most extreme case, black children who enter the judicial system are far more likely than their white counterparts to be tried--that is, legally defined, in <i>opposition </i>to biology--as adults. Anna Mae Duane's work focuses our attention on the political uses of children's suffering during the early years of this nation. It's our job to carry the inquiry forward to illuminate the racial politics of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries--and today.Robin Bernsteinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13779213058386648690noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2339821158923815105.post-8397377736410972452013-06-02T08:00:00.004-04:002013-06-02T08:20:47.613-04:00"Fresh and astonishing"The current issue of <i><a href="http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theatre_journal/toc/tj.65.2.html">Theatre Journal</a></i> just came out, and it features a fabulous series of reviews of recent books on African American theatre, drama, and performance studies. The issue reviews books by colleagues who have taught me so much: Koritha Mitchell, Stephanie Leigh Batiste, Soyica Diggs Colbert, Brandi Wilkins Catanese, Diana Rebekkah Paulin, Nicole R. Fleetwood, and many others. A grand total of fifteen recent books in African American theatre, drama, and performance! As Harvey Young points out in a review essay that precedes the book review section, we are witnessing a moment of extraordinary productivity and excitement in the field.<br />
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I'm honored that the <a href="http://muse.jhu.edu.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/journals/theatre_journal/v065/65.2.ducomb.html">lead book review</a> in this issue is <a href="http://www.colgate.edu/facultysearch/FacultyDirectory/christian-ducomb">Christian DuComb</a>'s treatment of <i>Racial Innocence</i>. DuComb writes,<br />
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<blockquote>In his essay "From Work to Text," Roland Barthes contends that true interdisciplinary scholarship is to be found not in books that challenge the limits of already constituted disciplines, but rather in books that define new objects of knowledge and introduce new methodologies, new ways of knowing. <i>Racial Innocence</i> is such a book. Through inspired analyses of <i>Uncle Tom's Cabin</i> (1852) and children's doll-play, Robin Bernstein reads nineteenth-century childhood innocence as "the performed transcendence of social categories of class, gender, and, most importantly . . . , race" (6). . . . To uncover the racializing force of childhood innocence, Bernstein moves nimbly through the sprawl of nineteenth-century popular culture in the United States, drawing evidence from visual, literary, material, and theatrical sources. Her impressive array of examples comes together through the new historical methodology that drives <i>Racial Innocence</i>: reading material artifacts as "scriptive things"—that is, as prompts for performance (8). Like a play text, a scriptive thing "deeply influences but does not entirely determine live performances, which vary according to agential individuals' visions, impulses, resistances, [and] revisions" (71). Reading material things as scripts for embodied behavior not only troubles Diana Taylor's famous distinction between the archive and the repertoire, but also leads Bernstein to fresh and astonishing conclusions about race, childhood, and US history.<br />
</blockquote><br />
Many thanks to Christian DuComb for this terrific review, and to <i>Theatre Journal</i>'s book review editor, <a href="http://pad.artsci.wustl.edu/julia-walker">Julia Walker</a>, for curating such a fantastic series that demonstrates the vibrancy of the field.Robin Bernsteinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13779213058386648690noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2339821158923815105.post-15803325373925933032013-05-30T05:33:00.000-04:002013-05-30T05:33:42.714-04:00Winner, Grace Abbott Best Book Award, Society for the History of Childhood and YouthI am thrilled to announce that <i>Racial Innocence</i> has won the <a href="http://shcyhome.org/2013/02/grace-abbott-best-book-award/">Grace Abbott Best Book Award</a> from the <a href="http://shcyhome.org/">Society for the History of Childhood and Youth</a>. This biennial prize honors the "best book published in English on the history of children, childhood, or youth (broadly construed)." The prize committee, chaired by <a href="http://brown.edu/Administration/Dean_of_the_College/advising_central/deans/Stephen_Lassonde.php">Stephen Lassonde</a> and including <a href="http://children.camden.rutgers.edu/profile/cook.htm">Dan T. Cook</a>, <a href="https://www.tema.liu.se/tema-b/medarbetaren/skold-johanna?l=en">Johanna Sköld</a>, and <a href="http://www.history.ubc.ca/people/leslie-paris">Leslie Paris</a>, wrote of my book,<br />
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<blockquote><br />
Bernstein achieves what the best work in any historical subfield attempts, which is to assimilate its themes, methods, and perspectives into the mainstream of the broader discourses of historiography. <i>Racial Innocence</i> goes a step further by introducing a new methodology into the study of the past. Her key contribution in this vein is to deploy “scriptive things” in the service of historical imagination: that is, to highlight and analyze the ways in which objects insinuate “perfomative scripts” for their users. Bernstein uses this concept to reimagine the worlds of slave girls and women through, for example, “Topsy” dolls, or the worldview of a performative text like the various versions of <i>Uncle Tom’s Cabin</i>. . . . In short, <i>Racial Innocence</i> synthesizes a range of materials and methods to build a case for innocence as an important category of historical-cultural analysis. It is original, theoretically challenging, and adds fundamentally new insights to the history of childhood. It says as much about the past as the times we live in and is applicable as well to racialist discourse in children's cultures trans-nationally.<br />
</blockquote><br />
I am so grateful to be honored by a society as intellectually rich and productive as the SHCY. I've been a member of this organization for many years, and its publication, the <a href="http://shcyhome.org/publications/"><i>Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth</i>,</a> is one of the few journals I read cover to cover (the JHCY recently reviewed <i>Racial Innocence</i>, which it called "<a href="http://racialinnocence.blogspot.com/2013/03/intellectually-exhilarating.html">intellectually exhilarating</a>").<br />
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To my regret, I won't be able to attend the conference of the SHCY this June, which will be in Nottingham University in the UK. Even though I will miss the Awards Ceremony, I hope I can project my gratitude for this honor all the way across the Atlantic Ocean. It is a thrill indeed!<br />
Robin Bernsteinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13779213058386648690noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2339821158923815105.post-29985936149373885342013-05-13T14:25:00.000-04:002013-05-16T13:57:43.730-04:00"A paradigm-shifting study of major significance"A wonderful new review by <a href="http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/clas/staff/judith.newman">Judie Newman</a> in the <a href="http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayJournal?jid=AMS"><i>Journal of American Studies</i></a>:<br />
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<blockquote>"In arguing that the concept of childhood innocence has been inextricably linked to race in America, in order to exclude black children from the realm of childhood and to sanction social violence against African Americans, Robin Bernstein has produced a paradigm-shifting study of major significance, both for Americanists and for the study of childhood." Judie Newman, <i><a href="http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=8893460&utm_source=buffer&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Buffer&utm_content=buffer5c9cd">Journal of American Studies</a></i> 47 (2013): 561-562.</blockquote>Robin Bernsteinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13779213058386648690noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2339821158923815105.post-76851476973692763422013-03-24T10:36:00.000-04:002013-03-24T12:49:45.980-04:00Winner, Children's Lit Association Book AwardI am thrilled to announce that <i>Racial Innocence</i> has won the <a href="http://www.childlitassn.org/index.php?page=about&family=awards&display=24">2013 Book Award</a> from the <a href="http://www.childlitassn.org/index.php?page=homepage">Children's Literature Association</a>. I'm deeply honored to see my book join the ranks with past winners, which include stellar works such as Nathalie op de Beeck's <i>Suspended Animation: Children's Picture Books and the Fairy Tale of Modernity</i> (University of Minnesota Press, 2010), Marah Gubar's <i>Artful Dodgers: Reconceiving the Golden Age of Children’s Literature</i> (Oxford University Press, 2009), Leonard Marcus's <i>Minders of Make-Believe: Idealists, Entrepreneurs, and the Shaping of American Children’s Literature</i> (Houghton-Mifflin, 2008), Kimberley Reynolds's <i>Radical Children’s Literature: Future Visions and Aesthetic Transformations in Juvenile Fiction</i> (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), Julia Mickenberg's <i>Learning from the Left: Children's Literature, the Cold War, and Radical Politics in the United States</i> (Oxford University Press, 2006), Katharine Capshaw Smith's <i>Children's Literature of the Harlem Renaissance</i> (Indiana University Press, 2004), Claudia Nelson's <i>Little Strangers: Portrayals of Adoption and Foster Care in America, 1850-1929</i> (Indiana University Press, 2003), and Lois Kuznets's <i>When Toys Come Alive: Narratives of Animation, Metamorphosis, and Development</i> (Yale University Press, 1994). When I look at this list (and the much longer list of <a href="http://www.childlitassn.org/index.php?page=about&family=awards&display=24">all the winners and honorable mentions</a> for this award), I realize how deeply these books have influenced me, and how many of them I cite in <i>Racial Innocence</i> or elsewhere. Many, many thanks to the <a href="http://www.childlitassn.org/index.php?page=about&family=about&category=Committees-col-_Elected&display=92">prize committee</a> chaired by <a href="http://english.richmond.edu/faculty/egruner/">Elisabeth Gruner</a>, to ChLA president (and Bryn Mawr College alumna!) <a href="http://www.english.tamu.edu/people/claudianelson?destination=user%2F9">Claudia Nelson</a>, and most of all, to the <a href="http://www.childlitassn.org/">Children's Literature Association</a> for fostering decades of exemplary children's literature scholarship, without which I never could have written <i>Racial Innocence</i>.Robin Bernsteinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13779213058386648690noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2339821158923815105.post-59532494677406087682013-03-24T09:25:00.000-04:002013-03-24T09:26:11.981-04:00"Intellectually exhilarating"Many thanks to <a href="https://www.amherst.edu/people/facstaff/msaxton">Martha Saxton</a> of Amherst College for her review of <i>Racial Innocence</i> in the current issue of the <a href="http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_the_history_of_youth_and_childhood/"><i>Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth</i></a>. Saxton called <i>Racial Innocence</i><br />
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<blockquote>“intellectually exhilarating. . . . <i>Racial Innocence</i> will fascinate and inform readers across numerous disciplines.” Martha Saxton, <i>Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth</i> 6.1 (Winter 2013): 179-181<br />
</blockquote><br />
The full review has been published in the print version of the journal and will soon be available on the <a href="http://muse.jhu.edu/">Project Muse</a> website.Robin Bernsteinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13779213058386648690noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2339821158923815105.post-35140400088559900222013-02-15T16:14:00.001-05:002013-02-15T16:14:52.879-05:00"Riveting"Michelle H. Martin, <a href="http://www.sc.edu/cmcis/news/fall11/augustabaker_chair.html">Augusta Baker Endowed Chair in Childhood Literacy</a> at the University of South Carolina and immediate Past Present of the <a href="http://www.childlitassn.org/index.php?page=homepage">Children’s Literature Association</a>, has reviewed <i>Racial Innocence</i>:<br />
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<blockquote>“Robin Bernstein’s <i>Racial Innocence</i> 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. . . . <i>Racial Innocence</i> not only offers a new perspective on an important era in African American history and children’s literature history; it is so well written and well researched that it offers a riveting read for any scholar interested in the subject. Bernstein’s research is informed by major resources as well as obscure documents and records that would have been easy to overlook, but which add a wealth of support to her argument. Any reader who ingests <i>Racial Innocence</i> will look at this historical era with different eyes, and I, for one, will never see Raggedy Ann and Andy in quite the same way.” Michelle H. Martin, Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 38.1 (Spring 2013): 96-101.<br />
</blockquote><br />
Michelle H. Martin is the distinguished author of <i><a href="http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415646277/">Brown Gold: Milestones in African American Children's Picture Books, 1845-2002</a></i>, which provides a superb analytical overview of the subject. I'm honored that Professor Martin has reviewed my book, which I always envisioned as forming a dialogue with her own.Robin Bernsteinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13779213058386648690noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2339821158923815105.post-38753712286398089482013-01-20T13:26:00.000-05:002013-01-20T13:26:10.129-05:00A "powerhouse of a book"; an "intervention of the highest order"I'm honored that <a href="http://www.princeton.edu/sf/current-fellows/douglas-jones/">Douglas A. Jones</a>, a rising star in theatre and performance studies (and, like me, the recipient of an MA in <a href="http://tdps.umd.edu/">Theatre History, Theory, and Criticism</a> from the University of Maryland), has reviewed <i>Racial Innocence</i> for <i>The Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism</i>. Several years ago, Doug delivered one of the best papers I'd ever heard at a conference of the American Studies Association. Since that time, I've watched Doug's career with admiration. I'd happily read anything Doug publishes--and what an uncommon delight that what he has published, this week, is a review of my book. And what a review it is:<br />
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<blockquote>“A timely and exemplary contribution to the historiography of racial formation in the United States, Robin Bernstein’s <i>Racial Innocence</i> is an intervention of the highest order. The success of this meticulously researched and carefully argued book rests on two interrelated achievements: the development of a groundbreaking theory and its application toward highly revelatory ends. . . . [W]hat ultimately emerges in <i>Racial Innocence</i> is a historiographic framing that positions children as central actors, literally so, in American economic, political, and social projects. Bernstein writes, ‘Because the culture of childhood so often retains and repurposes that which has elsewhere become abject or abandoned, the study of childhood radically challenges many established historical periodizations’ (7). This is just one of the many invaluable lessons from this powerhouse of a book. Richly illustrated with stunning color plates and a bounty of black-and-white images, <i>Racial Innocence</i> will 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, <i>The Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism</i> 27.1 (Fall 2012): 143-146.</blockquote><br />
Robin Bernsteinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13779213058386648690noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2339821158923815105.post-88938374327196932442013-01-13T09:54:00.000-05:002013-01-13T09:54:22.944-05:00"Remarkably impressive.... Bernstein surprises us with fractures that we know."Sometimes a review takes your breath away. <a href="http://english.utah.edu/profile.php?org=coh&unid=u0028000">Kathryn Bond Stockton</a>'s, which just came out in <i><a href="http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/modern_drama/">Modern Drama</a></i>, is one such review of <i>Racial Innocence</i>.<br />
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The review begins:<br />
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<blockquote>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?<br />
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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 enthrones 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.<br />
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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.</blockquote><br />
I want to include all of the review, but I can't for copyright reasons. It's on <a href="http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/modern_drama/summary/v055/55.4.stockton.html">Project Muse</a>, for those of you who have access to that database. <br />
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Kathryn Bond Stockton is the author of three books, including, most recently, <i><a href="http://www.powells.com/biblio/73-9780822343868-0">The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century</a></i> and <i><a href="http://www.powells.com/biblio/61-9780822337966-1">Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame: Where "Black" Meets "Queer"</a></i>--books I admire keenly. I'm honored that Kathryn Bond Stockton reviewed my book, and I deeply appreciate this lyrical, compelling engagement.Robin Bernsteinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13779213058386648690noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2339821158923815105.post-14742277286553086352013-01-11T12:28:00.000-05:002013-01-11T12:28:03.980-05:00Third Printing<i>Racial Innocence</i> has gone into its third printing! After the first printing on December 1, 2011, the book returned for its second run in February 2012. Now, in January 2013, <a href="http://nyupress.org/series.aspx?seriesId=69">NYU Press</a> has sent the book back for a third print run. I've been told that<i> Racial Innocence</i> is the top seller among all books in the <a href="http://www.americanliteratures.org/">American Literatures Initiative</a>, an alliance of five publishers that have come together, with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, to publish and publicize first books in the humanities.<br />
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The great sales figures are due, first and foremost, to the skill and energy of the terrific folks at NYU Press and the ALI. They're also due to all the professors who've assigned my book in classes--large and small, undergraduate and graduate, in colleges and universities. In the past year, <i>Racial Innocence</i> has been assigned in classes at Boston College, the George Washington University, Harvard, Kansas State University, Middlebury College, New York University, Northwestern, Princeton, Rutgers University-Camden, Stanford, Tufts, the University of California at Berkeley, the University of California at Riverside, the University of Florida, the University of Pittsburgh, the University of South Carolina, the University of Texas at Austin, Washington University in St. Louis, Williams College, and Yale (if you know of another place where <i>Racial Innocence</i> is being taught, please <a href="mailto:rbernst@fas.harvard.edu">let me know</a>!).<br />
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The range of these courses has been amazing: from African American Studies (“Black Visual Cultures” and “The Archive, Minstrelsy and American Literature”) to theatre and performance studies (“Critical Approaches to Theatre and Performance”) to the history and literature of childhood (“Age in American Literature and Culture” and “Bad Boys & Wayward Girls: The Social Control of Problem Youth”). I'm especially proud that the book has been assigned in graduate-level, foundational methods courses in African American Studies <i>and</i> in theatre/performance studies <i>and</i> in American Studies.<br />
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I'm also grateful that the book has been reviewed widely. So far, reviews have appeared in <i>American Quarterly, Children’s Literature, Choice, Cultural Studies, Girlhood Studies, International Research in Children’s Literature, </i>the<i> Journal of American Culture,</i> the <i>Journal of Popular Culture, The Lion and the Unicorn,</i> and <i>Modern Drama.</i> Reviews are slated to appear in <i>Callaloo, Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, e-misférica, </i> H-SHGAPE (Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era), the<i> Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism,</i> the <i>Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, Legacy, MELUS, Partial Answers, Theatre History Studies, Theatre Journal,</i> and <i>Theatre Survey</i> (again, if you know of more, please <a href="mailto:rbernst@fas.harvard.edu">let me know</a>).<br />
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Many thanks to the bloggers who've spread the word about my book, especially <a href="http://www.philnel.com/">Philip Nel</a>, <a href="http://binaryopposites.wordpress.com/">Perry Nodelman</a>, and Michelle McCrary (who not only <a href="http://www.isthatyourchild.com/2012/08/thursday-think-tank-robin-bernstein-on.html">blogged</a> about the book but also <a href="http://www.isthatyourchild.com/2012/10/what-about-children-fantasy-of-racial.html">interviewed me on her radio show</a>, and then listed our interview among her <a href="http://www.isthatyourchild.com/2013/01/ityc-radios-favorite-interviews-of-2012.html">favorites of 2012</a>). And of course, thanks to the members of the book award committees at the <a href="http://www.theasa.net/opportunities/item/american_studies_association_awards_ceremony_2012/">American Studies Association</a>, the <a href="http://www.athe.org/displaycommon.cfm?an=1&subarticlenbr=22">Association for Theatre in Higher Education</a>, the <a href="http://www.neasa.org/">New England American Studies Association</a>, and the <a href="http://public.wsu.edu/~campbelld/ssaww/index.html">Society for the Study of American Women Writers</a>, all of which honored my book.<br />
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When I was writing <i>Racial Innocence</i>, I wanted one thing above all: I wanted people to read it. I'm so grateful to the individuals--too numerous to list here!--who have spread the word about this book and thus enabled it to find its way into the hands of readers. To all the scholars who've reviewed the book, professors who've assigned it, bloggers who've written about it, award committees that have honored it, NYU Press and ALI folks who've promoted it, and most of all, readers who've read it--thank you for making 2012 such a successful year for<i> Racial Innocence</i>.<br />
Robin Bernsteinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13779213058386648690noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2339821158923815105.post-46085270764086721882012-12-24T16:40:00.001-05:002012-12-24T17:20:43.204-05:00“Dazzling… incredibly moving… new and field-expanding ideas”<i><a href="http://www.americanquarterly.org/">American Quarterly</a></i> is the defining journal of American Studies, which is the field of <a href="http://americanstudies.yale.edu/">my Ph.D.</a> Book reviews in <i>AQ</i> are expansive and deep, and are typically authored by scholars who drive the field. I am thrilled, then, that the December 2012 issue of <i>AQ</i> includes a glorious review of <i>Racial Innocence</i> by <a href="http://www.hunter.cuny.edu/english/sarah-chinn/sarah-chinn">Sarah E. Chinn</a>. The review essay places <i>Racial Innocence</i> in conversation with two other recent, influential books about race and US culture: <a href="http://amerstudies.rutgers.edu/people-menu/core-faculty/nicole-r-fleetwood">Nicole Fleetwood's</a> <i><a href="http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/T/bo10184159.html">Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness</a></i> and <a href="http://english.pomona.edu/people/kyla-tompkins/">Kyla Wazana Tompkins's</a> <i><a href="http://nyupress.org/books/book-details.aspx?bookId=8449#.UNjEiaz-L1U">Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the Nineteenth Century</a> </i>(which is, like <i>Racial Innocence</i>, part of NYU Press's amazing series, <a href="http://nyupress.org/series.aspx?seriesId=69">America and the Long 19th Century</a>). Chinn wrote very positively and at length about <i>Racial Innocence</i>. Some highlights:<br />
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<blockquote>“Bernstein argues convincingly and chillingly that the figures of black children we see from Topsy on are depicted as a special breed of child: pickaninnies. In her close analysis of the figure of the pickaninny, Bernstein reveals to readers what has been in plain sight all along, if we had only had the perspicacity to notice it. The pickaninny is white culture’s alibi for violence against African Americans: he or she is insensate to pain, able to withstand violence with a laugh and a toss of the head. . . . [Bernstein’s] archive here is breathtaking both in its depth and how much it appalls the reader. . . .<br />
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“In a dazzling analysis, Bernstein convincingly argues that the psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Phipps Clark were so eager to see doll choice as ‘transparent revelation of black children’s damaged self-esteem’ that they ignored black children’s actual cultural experiences of black and white dolls <i>as</i> dolls, which had ‘their own histories of performance’ as scriptive things. Children both black and white knew the [violent and degrading] roles to which black dolls were relegated, and the Clarks’ study forced the black children both to implicitly acknowledge that status (in the request, ‘Give me the doll that you like to play with’) and explicitly identify their own blackness with the degraded status of the black doll (in the request ‘Give me the doll that looks like you’). No wonder that the black test subjects either clammed up, wept, or ran out of the room, since the ‘impossible, binary demand that the Clarks’ subjects faced [was]: liken yourself to a black doll or appear to reject your own racial identity.’ It is a credit to Bernstein’s carefully documented and at the same time expressively written discussion throughout <i>Racial Innocence</i> that I found this moment incredibly moving. In their desire to achieve racial justice, the Clarks were not just tone-deaf to black children’s relationship to the racialized world of dolls but traumatized them further. . . . <br />
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"Reading <i>Racial Innocence</i>. . . I experienced moments of excitement and delight that come with encountering new and field-expanding ideas.” <br />
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--Sarah E. Chinn, "Racialized Things," <i>American Quarterly</i> 64.4 (December 2012): 873-883.</blockquote><br />
It is an honor to be reviewed in <i>American Quarterly</i>, and a review as thoughtful and appreciative as Chinn's is a rare thrill. I don't observe Christmas, but if I did, I'd say this review was a very good Christmas present indeed.<br />
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Robin Bernsteinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13779213058386648690noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2339821158923815105.post-18422152770024565542012-12-08T09:41:00.000-05:002012-12-08T09:41:18.104-05:00"Daringly imaginative"I'm honored that the distinguished scholar of children's literature <a href="http://ion.uwinnipeg.ca/~nodelman/">Perry Nodelman</a> has reviewed <i>Racial Innocence</i> in <i><a href="http://www.euppublishing.com/journal/ircl">International Research in Children's Literature</a></i>, the journal of the <a href="http://www.irscl.com/index.html">International Research Society for Children's Literature</a>, of which I am a proud member. Professor Nodelman called my book<br />
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<blockquote>“Daringly imaginative… <i>Racial Innocence</i> is an unsettlingly convincing and therefore usefully unsettling book… Bernstein[’s] careful, subtle, and richly detailed analyses act as an almost anthropological thick description, revealing the complex ways in which apparently simple objects express and interact both with history and culture and with the people who use them. They provide a model for scholars brave enough and wise enough to attempt to apply her methodology in other contexts. <i>Racial Innocence</i> has taught me more than I expected possible about subjects I thought I knew too well for something like that to happen. I highly recommend it.” Perry Nodelman, <i>International Research in Children’s Literature</i> vol. 5, no. 2 (December 2012): 227-229.</blockquote><br />
As I've written on this blog before, I deeply admire Perry Nodelman's work, so I value and appreciate this review tremendously. For information about how to become a member of the IRSCL and to join the international conversation about children's literature, please go to <a href="http://www.irscl.com/join.html">http://www.irscl.com</a>.Robin Bernsteinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13779213058386648690noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2339821158923815105.post-31098300126187094682012-11-19T10:56:00.000-05:002012-11-19T11:01:37.286-05:00American Studies Association, 2012!<i>Racial Innocence</I> was runner-up for the <a href="http://www.theasa.net/prizes_and_grants/awards_and_prizes/#Franklin">John Hope Franklin Publication Prize</a>, which the American Studies Association awards every year for "the best-published book in American Studies." Also a runner-up this year was <a href="http://www.princeton.edu/~bgleason/">William Gleason</a>'s terrific <i><a href="http://nyupress.org/books/book-details.aspx?bookId=6380#.UKpVdWfpWd4">Sites Unseen: Architecture, Race, and American Literature</a></i>. Because both <i>Racial Innocence</i> and <i>Sites Unseen</i> are part of the NYU Press series, "<a href="http://nyupress.org/series.aspx?seriesId=69">America and the Long 19th Century</a>," NYU Press threw a celebration at the ASA conference. My friend <a href="http://www.brianherrera.org/">Brian Herrera</a> snapped this photo of the poster NYU created. (I should have taken some photos at the party, which was awesome, but I didn't think of it until too late.) Thanks to Eric Zinner and NYU Press for continuing to support my book, to the ASA for recognizing my book in the John Hope Franklin Publication Prize competition, to Philip Nel for a great blurb on the poster, and to everyone who came to the party!<br />
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Robin Bernsteinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13779213058386648690noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2339821158923815105.post-45089261681926166072012-10-11T11:45:00.002-04:002012-10-11T11:45:54.224-04:00Oprah Winfrey, Arianna Huffington, Melinda Gates... and me!Today is International Day of the Girl! To mark the occasion, cnn.com asked a selection of women what advice they would give to their fifteen-year-old selves. The women include Oprah Winfrey, Arianna Huffington, Melinda Gates... and me! You can <a href="http://us.cnn.com/2012/10/11/world/gallery/international-day-of-the-girl/index.html">read my advice</a>, as well as that of Christiane Amanpour, Queen Rania of Jordan, Fabiola Gianotti, Victoria Azerenka, Maria Shriver, Zaha Hadid, Maria Sharapova, and few others on cnn.com's "<a href="http://us.cnn.com/SPECIALS/leading-women/">Leading Women</a>" page. I get a little vertigo being in such august company!Robin Bernsteinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13779213058386648690noreply@blogger.com0