Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights: 16 (America and the Long 19th Century) - Hardcover

Bernstein, Robin

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 081478707X ISBN 13: 9780814787076

Publisher: NYU Press, 2011

Synopsis

2013 Book Award Winner from the International Research Society in Children's Literature   2012 Outstanding Book Award Winner from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education    2012 Winner of the Lois P. Rudnick Book Prize presented by the New England American Studies Association    2012 Runner-Up, John Hope Franklin Publication Prize presented by the American Studies Association   2012 Honorable Mention, Distinguished Book Award presented by the Society for the Study of American Women Writers   Part of the American Literatures Initiative Series     Beginning in the mid nineteenth century in America, childhood became synonymous with innocence—a reversal of the previously-dominant Calvinist belief that children were depraved, sinful creatures. As the idea of childhood innocence took hold, it became racialized: popular culture constructed white children as innocent and vulnerable while excluding black youth from these qualities. Actors, writers, and visual artists then began pairing white children with African American adults and children, thus transferring the quality of innocence to a variety of racial-political projects—a dynamic that Robin Bernstein calls “racial innocence.” This phenomenon informed racial formation from the mid nineteenth century through the early twentieth.
 
Racial Innocence takes up a rich archive including books, toys, theatrical props, and domestic knickknacks which Bernstein 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.   Check out the author's blog for the book here. 

About this title

Review:

"A powerhouse of a book. . . [an] intervention of the highest order. Racial Innocencewill 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 "Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism "

"Racial Innocence is an invaluable contribution. . . it enlivens a diverse constellation of evidence, making it an exemplary model for any interdisciplinary project of similarly ambitious scope."--Meredith A. Bak "Journal of Popular Culture "

"Revelatory."--Anna Mae Duane "MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the US "

"Vibrant. . . [An] exemplary model of interdisciplinary scholarship."--Kristen B. Proehl "African American Review "

"A provocative, insightful, and bold text that demonstrates how important the field of cultural studies is and can be."--Jenny Wills "Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures "

"A paradigm-shifting study of major significance."--Judie Newman "The Journal of American Studies "

"Bernstein's text unfolds with a readerly pleasure few scholarly books achieve, as she offers stunning close readings while steadily constructing a compelling narrative arc built upon each piece of evidence."--Legacy

"Groundbreaking . . . radical."--Lisa Merrill "Theatre Annual "

"Nineteenth and early twentieth-century material culture comes alive in Robin Bernsteins 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 childs 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

"You will never look at a Raggedy Ann doll the same way again."--Rebecca Onion "Backlist "

About the Author:

Robin Bernstein is Associate Professor of African and African American Studies and Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University.  Her previous books include Cast Out: Queer Lives in Theater.

About this edition

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 081478707X
• ISBN 13: 9780814787076
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 318