Racial Innocence: American Literatures Initiative

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Friday, February 17, 2012

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SYNOPSIS OF RACIAL INNOCENCE

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.

PRAISE FOR RACIAL INNOCENCE

"One of those rare books that shifts the paradigm—a book that, in years to come, will be recognized as a landmark in children’s literature and childhood studies. . . . [F]ew scholars can write a sentence like Bernstein can: packed with insight, theoretically sophisticated, and yet lucid—even, at times, lyrical.” Philip Nel, Children’s Literature

"Nineteenth and early twentieth-century material culture comes alive in Robin Bernstein's 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 child's 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

"I know of virtually no one of her generation who writes with this kind of verve, authority and pleasure." Karen Sanchez-Eppler, Amherst College

"A historiographic tour de force... a classic." Outstanding Book Award Committee, Association for Theatre in Higher Education

“Dazzling… incredibly moving… new and field-expanding ideas.” Sarah E. Chinn, American Quarterly

"Intellectually exhilarating." Martha Saxton, Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth

A "powerhouse of a book"; an "intervention of the highest order." Douglas A. Jones, Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism

"Magnificent and stylish... truly groundbreaking." Richard Flynn, The Lion and the Unicorn

"Riveting." Michelle H. Martin, Children’s Literature Association Quarterly

"Remarkably impressive.... Bernstein surprises us with fractures that we know." Kathryn Bond Stockton, Modern Drama

Friday, February 17, 2012

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