"Revelatory"

Many thanks to Anna Mae Duane for this splendid review in the current issue of MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the US:

"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, MELUS 38.2 (Summer 2013): 154-155

Duane's book, Suffering Childhood in Early America: Violence, Race, and the Making of the Child Victim, was a major source and inspiration to me as I wrote Racial Innocence. 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, The Onion 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 opposition 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.

"Fresh and astonishing"

The current issue of Theatre Journal 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.

I'm honored that the lead book review in this issue is Christian DuComb's treatment of Racial Innocence. DuComb writes,

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. Racial Innocence is such a book. Through inspired analyses of Uncle Tom's Cabin (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 Racial Innocence: 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.

Many thanks to Christian DuComb for this terrific review, and to Theatre Journal's book review editor, Julia Walker, for curating such a fantastic series that demonstrates the vibrancy of the field.

Winner, Grace Abbott Best Book Award, Society for the History of Childhood and Youth

I am thrilled to announce that Racial Innocence has won the Grace Abbott Best Book Award from the Society for the History of Childhood and Youth. 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 Stephen Lassonde and including Dan T. Cook, Johanna Sköld, and Leslie Paris, wrote of my book,

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. Racial Innocence 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 Uncle Tom’s Cabin. . . . In short, Racial Innocence 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.

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 Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, is one of the few journals I read cover to cover (the JHCY recently reviewed Racial Innocence, which it called "intellectually exhilarating").

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!

"A paradigm-shifting study of major significance"

A wonderful new review by Judie Newman in the Journal of American Studies:

"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, Journal of American Studies 47 (2013): 561-562.

Winner, Children's Lit Association Book Award

I am thrilled to announce that Racial Innocence has won the 2013 Book Award from the Children's Literature Association. 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 Suspended Animation: Children's Picture Books and the Fairy Tale of Modernity (University of Minnesota Press, 2010), Marah Gubar's Artful Dodgers: Reconceiving the Golden Age of Children’s Literature (Oxford University Press, 2009), Leonard Marcus's Minders of Make-Believe: Idealists, Entrepreneurs, and the Shaping of American Children’s Literature (Houghton-Mifflin, 2008), Kimberley Reynolds's Radical Children’s Literature: Future Visions and Aesthetic Transformations in Juvenile Fiction (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), Julia Mickenberg's Learning from the Left: Children's Literature, the Cold War, and Radical Politics in the United States (Oxford University Press, 2006), Katharine Capshaw Smith's Children's Literature of the Harlem Renaissance (Indiana University Press, 2004), Claudia Nelson's Little Strangers: Portrayals of Adoption and Foster Care in America, 1850-1929 (Indiana University Press, 2003), and Lois Kuznets's When Toys Come Alive: Narratives of Animation, Metamorphosis, and Development (Yale University Press, 1994). When I look at this list (and the much longer list of all the winners and honorable mentions for this award), I realize how deeply these books have influenced me, and how many of them I cite in Racial Innocence or elsewhere. Many, many thanks to the prize committee chaired by Elisabeth Gruner, to ChLA president (and Bryn Mawr College alumna!) Claudia Nelson, and most of all, to the Children's Literature Association for fostering decades of exemplary children's literature scholarship, without which I never could have written Racial Innocence.

"Intellectually exhilarating"

Many thanks to Martha Saxton of Amherst College for her review of Racial Innocence in the current issue of the Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth. Saxton called Racial Innocence

“intellectually exhilarating. . . . Racial Innocence will fascinate and inform readers across numerous disciplines.” Martha Saxton, Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 6.1 (Winter 2013): 179-181

The full review has been published in the print version of the journal and will soon be available on the Project Muse website.

"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.