Third Printing

Racial Innocence 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, NYU Press has sent the book back for a third print run. I've been told that Racial Innocence is the top seller among all books in the American Literatures Initiative, 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.

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, Racial Innocence 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 Racial Innocence is being taught, please let me know!).

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 and in theatre/performance studies and in American Studies.

I'm also grateful that the book has been reviewed widely. So far, reviews have appeared in American Quarterly, Children’s Literature, Choice, Cultural Studies, Girlhood Studies, International Research in Children’s Literature, the Journal of American Culture, the Journal of Popular Culture, The Lion and the Unicorn, and Modern Drama. Reviews are slated to appear in Callaloo, Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, e-misférica, H-SHGAPE (Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era), the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, the Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, Legacy, MELUS, Partial Answers, Theatre History Studies, Theatre Journal, and Theatre Survey (again, if you know of more, please let me know).

Many thanks to the bloggers who've spread the word about my book, especially Philip Nel, Perry Nodelman, and Michelle McCrary (who not only blogged about the book but also interviewed me on her radio show, and then listed our interview among her favorites of 2012). And of course, thanks to the members of the book award committees at the American Studies Association, the Association for Theatre in Higher Education, the New England American Studies Association, and the Society for the Study of American Women Writers, all of which honored my book.

When I was writing Racial Innocence, 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 Racial Innocence.

Racial Innocence and The Book of Mormon?

One of the best aspects of writing and teaching is that you never know where people will take your work. Ideas travel in ways that individual human beings never can. And sometimes ideas go places that their originators never could have imagined. Recently, the children's literature scholar Perry Nodelman blogged about how my idea of scriptive things has enabled him to think in new ways about salt and pepper shakers. When I wrote my book, I hadn't thought at all about salt and pepper shakers (but I've thought about them a lot since reading Perry Nodelman's blog!), but I had thought about related material items of domestic life--tableware and food, for example. So I was delighted but not entirely surprised when Perry Nodelman made the connection between scriptive things and shakers.

Sometimes, though, other scholars take your ideas someplace completely unexpected, someplace that you never could have imagined. That happened this week when Allan Davis of Brigham Young University (and an alum of my alma mater, the University of Maryland) used my ideas to explicate a chapter of The Book of Mormon, specifically Alma 43-52.

I haven't read The Book of Mormon, so I don't have any thoughts about Allan Davis's interpretation. But I'm honored that he found my ideas useful in his own intellectual and spiritual practices. And I'm grateful to be reminded, yet again, of just how far our ideas can travel. When we publish, when we send our ideas out into the world, we never know where they will have an impact--and that fact is as exciting as it is humbling.

Racial Innocence "stunningly informative" with "broad implications"

Thanks to Michelle McCrary for blogging about Racial Innocence on the terrific website, Is That Your Child: Parenting in Full Color. She called Racial Innocence

stunningly informative ... As I make my way through her book, I realized the broad implications of her work and how it relates to the ways in which society views children of color, especially black children.

It means a lot to me that my book is proving useful to parents and other non-academics who care about children, culture, and racial politics. ITYC has a radio show that looks awesome--you know I'll be listening.

Perry Nodelman and the Scripts of Salt and Pepper Sets

The distinguished children's literature scholar Perry Nodelman, author of The Hidden Adult: Defining Children's Literature and many other important books, has been blogging about his hobby: collecting novelty salt and pepper sets. These sets raise fascinating questions about the nature of pairs, about humor, and about representations of race, gender, and sexuality. As Prof. Nodelman points out, salt and pepper shakers also raise questions about the nature of things: in the language of Racial Innocence, they are scriptive things in that they prompt or invite a range of behaviors, including but also extending far beyond the actions of salting and peppering. Today, Professor Nodelman blogged about scriptive things, Racial Innocence, and salt and pepper sets. He wrote,

As I read Racial Innocence, I learned a great deal I hadn’t expect to learn about how concepts of race have found expression in American culture in a variety of ways, in a number of surprising contexts, and in a number of surprisingly subtle scripted actions invited by a range of interesting (and interestingly scripted) scriptive things. But I also found myself thinking that much of what Bernstein had to say about the scriptive things she described might also be applied to novelty salt and pepper shakers–most obviously, to ones like those representing black stereotypes like the one I’ve described in previous entries, such as this set of Aunt Jemima and Uncle Mose I discussed here and here[.] But, I found myself thinking, why stop there? The concept of scriptive things seemed like an intriguing and, for me, new of thinking about the objects we surround ourselves with and use on a daily basis. It might well throw light, not just on the shaker sets with African American connections, but on a whole range of other sets depicting a whole range of different kinds of subjects. So I’ve decided to do some thinking about that, in a series of entries to follow.

Yes, why stop there? Kitchens--indeed, whole houses--are full of scriptive things that create meaning in a myriad of ways. This is the best part of being an academic: when other scholars apply your ideas in contexts you never could have imagined. I'm so glad that my book has proved useful to Perry Nodelman, and I can't wait for the "entries to follow!"