Person:

Bernstein, Robin

This manifesto argues that the field of children’s literature has, for too long, downplayed the historical relationship among children’s literature, toys, and play. If we desist from erecting arbitrary boundaries among these modes of cultural production, we stand to gain three benefits: we will better understand how children’s literature actually functions in the everyday lives of children; we will mitigate the “top, down” understanding of children’s literature that underestimates children’s agency; and we will hinge our field to disciplines and interdisciplines that already care about material culture and play—and thus we will expand our influence and power across the university.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, popular images of African American children became increasingly denigrating. However, John Newton Hyde, a white, prolific, mid-nineteenth century commercial artist of middling talent produced two quietly extraordinary, radically anti-racist images of African American children. Each of these illustrations cannily revised an image from Uncle Tom’s Cabin to envision racial egalitarianism. This article locates these images within the intensifying visual denigration of black children during the second half of the nineteenth century—a process of dehumanization that reached its nadir, by the end of the century, in the grotesque figure of the “pickaninny.” If Hyde—a white man of economic privilege, a political moderate, and an artist of no great genius—was able to visualize racial egalitarianism through black children, then the potential existed for such images to become widespread in the second half of the nineteenth century. But that did not happen. Hyde’s two images linger as small, painful signposts upon a visual and political road that was less taken.

This essay uses performance theory to intervene in a decades-long debate about a characteristic of children's literature: it is the only major category of literature written by one group (adults) for another (children). According to a contested but tenacious school of thought, this difference between writers and readers embeds top-down power, or adult domination of children, in children's literature. I identify a popular subcategory of children's literature, the “going-to-bed book” (exemplified by Margaret Wise Brown and Clement Hurd's Goodnight Moon), which appears to epitomize and therefore shore up this top-down model. I then read going-to-bed books through function—that is, the ritualistic actions or performances that these books prompt, or script, among child and adult readers. This mode of analysis initially produces seemingly powerful evidence in support of the top-down model of children's literature; but that evidence, as I show by examining two recent best sellers, ultimately unravels.

As affect studies has become increasingly central to performance studies and many other fields, a question has emerged: How can one historicize affect? This essay forges one answer through analysis of The Method Gun, a 2008 avant-garde theatrical piece created by the Austin-based company the Rude Mechs. The Method Gun simultaneously archives actors’ historically specific feelings of shame, and reveals shame as a motor that powers much contemporary theatre. The Method Gun singles out method-based realism as a site of special intensity in the production of shame. Because method-based realism is historically and geographically located and because shame is increasingly central to affect studies (and especially queer affect studies), method acting presents an extraordinary opportunity to historicize affect. Modern theatre history, then, is vital to the transdisciplinary project of thinking historically about affect.

A seemingly impossible, utopian moment occurred on April 16, 2007 at the convocation following the mass shooting at Virginia Tech, in which student Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 students and faculty members. Nikki Giovanni, a luminary of the Black Arts Movement and a professor at Virginia Tech, read her stirring poem, “We Are Virginia Tech,” to the capacity audience in Cassell Coliseum. At the poem’s conclusion, the full house rose cheering and chanted, “Let’s Go, Hokies.” In this context, the familiar sports chant “took on new meaning,” as one local newspaper noted. The chant became a poem. And the audience members became poets, performing in alliance with a black feminist poet.

This essay argues that this transformation became possible despite Giovanni’s racially marked and gender-queer performance because of Giovanni’s poetic invocation of unity in the context of the physical space of the sports arena. Giovanni’s poem invented a “we” that drew upon what Marvin Carlson would call the “haunted” aspects of the sports arena. Unlike the “we” constituted through past performances of athletic events, however, Giovanni’s “we” had no “they.” This subtle but crucial twist enabled Giovanni’s performance to harness the power of the athletic “we” (a “we” that is, like collegiate sports, always racially saturated) while steering it definitively away from the insularity, racism, and xenophobia that so palpably threatened to overwhelm a campus that had just sustained a mass shooting by a man of color. Most significantly of all, the setting of the sports arena invited the restoration of gestures—standing, chanting, clapping—by which the audience performed utopia. Nikki Giovanni’s performance, and the audience’s physical response, ultimately enables a new understanding of utopian performance—one based not on audiences feeling, but on audiences moving.