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.

Proceeding from Robyn Wiegman's call for a transition from questions of "why" to "how" with regard to formations of race, this article proposes a heuristic, the "scriptive thing," to analyze ways in which racial subjectivation emerges through everyday physical engagement with the material world. The term scriptive thing integrates performance studies and "thing theory" by highlighting the ways in which things prompt, structure, or choreograph behavior. A knife, a camera, and a novel all invite—indeed, create occasions for—repetitions of acts, distinctive and meaningful motions of eyes, hands, shoulders, hips, feet. These things are citational in that they arrange and propel bodies in recognizable ways, through paths of evocative movement that have been traveled before. I use the term script as a theatrical professional might, to denote not a rigid dictation of performed action but, rather, a necessary openness to resistance, interpretation, and improvisation. A "scriptive thing," like a play script, broadly structures a performance while unleashing original, live variations. Like the police in Louis Althusser's famous scenario, scriptive things leap out within a field, address an individual, and demand to be reckoned with. By answering a hail, by entering the scripted scenario, the individual is interpellated into ideology and thus into subjecthood. I conduct close readings of scriptive things, including a photograph of a light-skinned woman posing in about 1930 with a caricature of a young African American man, a set of twentieth-century arcade photographs, a viciously racist 1898 alphabet book by E. W. Kemble, and a black doll called "Uncle Tom" that was whipped in the 1850s by a white girl who would grow up to write best-selling children's books. These readings show how interpellation occurs through confrontations in the material world, through dances between people and things.

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.