Racial Innocence
Racial Innocence
Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights
The phrase “childhood innocence” sounds racially neutral. But Robin Bernstein shows how this concept has always been saturated with racial—and racist—ideas.
In Racial Innocence, Robin Bernstein shows how the concept of "childhood innocence" has been central to U.S. racial formation since the mid-nineteenth century. Children--white ones imbued with innocence, black ones excluded from it, and others of color erased by it--figured pivotally in sharply divergent racial agendas from slavery and abolition to antiblack violence and the early civil rights movement.
Bernstein takes up a rich archive including books, toys, theatrical props, and domestic knickknacks which she 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.
Accolades
Winner, 2013 Grace Abbott Best Book Award, Society for the History of Children and Youth
Co-Winner, 2012 Outstanding Book Award, Association for Theatre in Higher Education
Winner, 2013 Book Award, Children’s Literature Association
Winner, 2012 Lois P. Rudnick Book Prize, New England American Studies Association
Winner, 2013 IRSCL Award, International Research Society for Children's Literature
Runner-Up, 2012 John Hope Franklin Publication Prize, American Studies Association
Honorable Mention, 2012 Book Award, Society for the Study of American Women Writers