"Riveting"

Michelle H. Martin, Augusta Baker Endowed Chair in Childhood Literacy at the University of South Carolina and immediate Past Present of the Children’s Literature Association, has reviewed Racial Innocence:

“Robin Bernstein’s Racial Innocence 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 Relying on personal accounts, archival records, historical documents, toys, and other articles with which children played, she then illustrates how, through their own forms of play and performance, black children effectively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. . . . Racial Innocence 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 Racial Innocence 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.

Michelle H. Martin is the distinguished author of Brown Gold: Milestones in African American Children's Picture Books, 1845-2002, 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.

A "powerhouse of a book"; an "intervention of the highest order"

I'm honored that Douglas A. Jones, a rising star in theatre and performance studies (and, like me, the recipient of an MA in Theatre History, Theory, and Criticism from the University of Maryland), has reviewed Racial Innocence for The Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism. 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:

“A timely and exemplary contribution to the historiography of racial formation in the United States, Robin Bernstein’s Racial Innocence 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 Racial Innocence 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, Racial Innocence 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, The Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 27.1 (Fall 2012): 143-146.

"Remarkably impressive.... Bernstein surprises us with fractures that we know."

Sometimes a review takes your breath away. Kathryn Bond Stockton's, which just came out in Modern Drama, is one such review of Racial Innocence.

The review begins:

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?

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.

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.

I want to include all of the review, but I can't for copyright reasons. It's on Project Muse, for those of you who have access to that database.

Kathryn Bond Stockton is the author of three books, including, most recently, The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century and Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame: Where "Black" Meets "Queer"--books I admire keenly. I'm honored that Kathryn Bond Stockton reviewed my book, and I deeply appreciate this lyrical, compelling engagement.

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.

“Dazzling… incredibly moving… new and field-expanding ideas”

American Quarterly is the defining journal of American Studies, which is the field of my Ph.D. Book reviews in AQ are expansive and deep, and are typically authored by scholars who drive the field. I am thrilled, then, that the December 2012 issue of AQ includes a glorious review of Racial Innocence by Sarah E. Chinn. The review essay places Racial Innocence in conversation with two other recent, influential books about race and US culture: Nicole Fleetwood's Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness and Kyla Wazana Tompkins's Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the Nineteenth Century (which is, like Racial Innocence, part of NYU Press's amazing series, America and the Long 19th Century). Chinn wrote very positively and at length about Racial Innocence. Some highlights:

“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. . . .

“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 as 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 Racial Innocence 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. . . .

"Reading Racial Innocence. . . I experienced moments of excitement and delight that come with encountering new and field-expanding ideas.”

--Sarah E. Chinn, "Racialized Things," American Quarterly 64.4 (December 2012): 873-883.

It is an honor to be reviewed in American Quarterly, 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.

"Daringly imaginative"

I'm honored that the distinguished scholar of children's literature Perry Nodelman has reviewed Racial Innocence in International Research in Children's Literature, the journal of the International Research Society for Children's Literature, of which I am a proud member. Professor Nodelman called my book

“Daringly imaginative… Racial Innocence 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. Racial Innocence 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, International Research in Children’s Literature vol. 5, no. 2 (December 2012): 227-229.

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 http://www.irscl.com.

American Studies Association, 2012!

Racial Innocence was runner-up for the John Hope Franklin Publication Prize, which the American Studies Association awards every year for "the best-published book in American Studies." Also a runner-up this year was William Gleason's terrific Sites Unseen: Architecture, Race, and American Literature. Because both Racial Innocence and Sites Unseen are part of the NYU Press series, "America and the Long 19th Century," NYU Press threw a celebration at the ASA conference. My friend Brian Herrera 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!