Runner-Up for ASA John Hope Franklin Prize

The American Studies Association has named Racial Innocence one of three runners-up for the John Hope Franklin Publication Prize for the best book in American Studies. I am simply stunned by this honor.

William Gleason's wonderful book, Sites Unseen: Architecture, Race, and American Literature is also a runner-up. Racial Innocence and Sites Unseen are both part of the NYU Press series, "America and the Long 19th Century." I'm proud to be a part of this series, and grateful to its editors--David Kazanjian, Elizabeth McHenry, and Priscilla Wald--for their vision and guidance.

It is a particular honor to receive this recognition in the name of John Hope Franklin, the distinguished scholar who transformed the study of African American history. Professor Franklin is a model of an academic life, with an emphasis on life. A simple list of his professional accomplishments would fill pages: his many, many books include The Emancipation Proclamation, The Militant South, The Color Line: Legacy for the Twenty-First Century, The Free Negro in North Carolina, Reconstruction After the Civil War, Mirror to America: The Autobiography of John Hope Franklin, George Washington Williams: A Biography, A Southern Odyssey: Travelers in the Ante-bellum North, and In Search of the Promised Land: A Slave Family in the Old South and Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation, both with Loren Schweninger. Perhaps his most influential book is From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African-Americans, the preeminent textbook on African American history, first published in 1947 and revised many times, most recently in co-authorship with my colleague, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham. John Hope Franklin served as president of Phi Beta Kappa, the Organization of American Historians, the American Historical Association, and the Southern Historical Association. In 1995, Professor Franklin received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor. In that same year, with Franklin's support and vision, the John Hope Franklin Research Center for African and African American History and Culture was established at Duke University. In 1997, Professor Franklin was the subject of a 90-minute PBS film, First Person Singular: John Hope Franklin.

Any one of these accomplishments (and this is a very partial list!) would warrant nothing short of awe for this man. My admiration for him extends well beyond his professional accomplishments, however. I know many people who worked for years with or alongside Dr. Franklin, and from many voices I have heard one story: John Hope Franklin was a mensch, a true human being. He was the brilliant scholar who never lost sight of the individuals around him; he honored the generations that came before him and especially those that came after him. I understand that he dearly loved his family, especially his wife, Aurelia Whittington Franklin, to whom he was married for 59 years until she passed away in 1999. He remained not only academically productive but also intellectually alive and passionately open to new ideas throughout his life, right up until his passing in 2009 at the age of 94.

This short tribute to John Hope Franklin is painfully incomplete. I could easily have created a list that was equally long and equally impressive, but that repeated none of the above information. For a fuller picture of his professional accomplishments--his publications, awards, and many other triumphs--look here, here, and here. The warmth with which he touched others is apparent in the memorial website, where his students, colleagues, friends, and family have offered moving testimony to the effect Professor Franklin had on their lives. Along with so many others, I have long been the beneficiary of John Hope Franklin's scholarship and intellectual generosity, and I am deeply honored to become one tiny part of his expansive legacy through an award that bears his name.

Honorable Mention for Book Award from the Society for the Study of American Women Writers

Racial Innocence has received an Honorable Mention for the Book Award from the Society for the Study of American Women Writers, a wonderful organization of which I am a proud lifetime member. As I wrote my book, I hoped fervently that Racial Innocence would find its way to Harriet Beecher Stowe scholars, and also to scholars who care about Harriet E. Wilson, Frances Harper, and Frances Hodgson Burnett, all of whom I discuss at length. The honorable mention helps me connect with these scholars, because it signals my book's relevance to the study of U.S. literature, and especially U.S. women's literature. I'm so grateful and also deeply honored to be recognized by the SSAWW.

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.

"magnificent and stylish... truly groundbreaking"

I'm honored that Richard Flynn, a scholar I have long admired, has reviewed Racial Innocence in The Lion and the Unicorn. And how fitting that the review appeared in a special issue, edited by Marah Gubar, on children and theatre. What excellent company on all counts.

“Innovative… nuanced and original… compelling… It should be apparent by now that Bernstein’s is a richly complex argument. What may not yet be apparent is that the book is also a magnificent and stylish performance of its own, consistently provocative, consistently illuminating, and consistently well written. The scholarship is impeccable—indeed, the footnotes alone provide a wealth of information for future scholars. It is not often that a truly groundbreaking book in the field of childhood (or children’s) studies comes along. Robin Bernstein’s Racial Innocence is just such a book.” Richard Flynn, The Lion and the Unicorn 36.2 (2012), 209-213.

"A tremendous resource....An exemplary model for any interdisciplinary project of similarly ambitious scope"

Another review is out! This one is in the Journal of Popular Culture. The review is by Meredith Bak, who maintains a very interesting blog about optical toys. Here's the final paragraph of her review:

Racial Innocence is an invaluable contribution not only because it exposes the racial dimensions of the concept of childhood innocence, but also because of its unique methodology, which addresses a critical gap between discussing childhood as a concept and addressing children’s lived experiences. Bernstein’s careful treatment of primary materials through the lens of performance expertly illuminates the intended uses and meanings of these objects, but crucially, she attributes agency to the real children who interacted with them by suggesting how these meanings are mutable and were reshaped in practice, leaving space for resistance to the dominant scripts. While the book is certain to find application within black studies, performance studies, material culture studies, and history, it is also a tremendous resource to those working in the areas of literary and media studies. It enlivens a diverse constellation of evidence, making it an exemplary model for any interdisciplinary project of similarly ambitious scope. --Meredith Bak, Journal of Popular Culture 45.4 (August 2012): 913-915.

"illuminate[s] the racialised residues of our own childhoods in our everyday adult lives"

Another review is in! This review by Aaron C. Thomas just appeared in the journal Cultural Studies. The review summarizes the book extensively and accurately, and I especially appreciated the way in which Thomas picked up on how the book claims girls and girlhood as central to US racial formation. Here's the closing paragraph of the three-page review:

Bernstein's book will be of keen interest to those working to study either childhood or toy culture in the United States, as well as to scholars of critical race theory or postcolonial studies. The author's deep understanding of nineteenth-century childhood play and the black-and-white imagery of minstrelsy in the United States allows her to describe in a clear and meaningful way the long-term effects of racialised nineteenth-century culture on our present day. Further, because Bernstein presses on Michel de Certeau's notion of tactics, or the ways in which consumers put the objects in their lives to productive use, Racial Innocence outlines new methodologies with which to analyse the seemingly inert objects that are marketed to consumers across the globe. Perhaps even more importantly, Bernstein's theory of the scriptive thing asks us to see children as active participants in culture, and, in fact, as expert agents of the culture of childhood into which they have been interpellated. In this way, Bernstein is able not only to describe the effects of nineteenth-century racialisation on twenty-first century US culture, but also to illuminate the racialised residues of our own childhoods in our everyday adult lives.