Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights (America and the Long 19th Century)
The "focus on the horrifying historical content built into supposedly innocent items of everyday culture is surely the book's most important point. [This] book would be a great resource for courses on race, children and childhood, power, and U.S. culture."Girlhood Studies, July 2012"A historiographic tour de force. [The] rich archive and nuanced analysis will make this a classic book for theater historians and performance theorists." Outstanding Book Award Committee, Association for Theatre in Higher Education"A tremendous resource. . . . [An] exemplary model for any interdisciplinary project of similarly ambitious scope." Journal of Popular Culture“Bernstein’s powerful account of how the sentimental ideology of childhood innocence, and particularly its highly gendered manifestations, function to articulate racial hierarchies gives strong and detailed evidence for how paying attention to childhood serves to refocus many all too familiar, and troublesome, facets of American culture. I know of virtually no one of her generation who writes with this kind of verve, authority and pleasure.Racial Innocencewill prove an important and widely read book—in part simply because it will be so much fun to read.” -Karen Sánchez-Eppler,Amherst College“Nineteenth and early twentieth-century material culture comes alive in Robin Bernstein’s 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 child’s play are integral to the making of whiteness and blackness and citizenship in this country.Racial Innocenceis 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“One of those rare books which, as I'm reading it, is giving me all sorts of disconcertingly new and disconcertingly persuasive ideas about subjects I've been thinking about for years. Apparently I don't know everything about the textuality of childhood—at least not yet. But I am learning more, and very much enjoying it. Highly recommended.” -Perry Nodelman,Prof. Emeritus, Univ. of Winnipeg and author ofThe Hidden Adult: Defining Children's Literature"One of those rare books that shifts the paradigm--a book that, in years to come, will be recognized as a landmark in children's literature and childhood studies...This is not one of those scholarly books that offer a thesis and then proceed to pummel the reader into submission by piling example on top of example. Instead, it develops a certain line of argument, and then turns, moving in a different direction, developing this new direction fully before changing tack once more. Structuring the argument this way makes for a much more interesting reading experience...[F]ew scholars can write a sentence like Bernstein can: packed with insight, theoretically sophisticated, and yet lucid--even, at times, lyrical..."-Philip Nel,Children's Literature