ALI books

• Bernstein, Robin. Racial Innocence: Performing Childhood and Race from Uncle Tom's Cabin to the New Negro Movement
  
  (available from New York University Press, Spring 2010).
  
  In the mid nineteenth century in America, childhood became synonymous with innocence, this in opposition to the Calvinist belief that children were depraved creatures, a view which held sway over the American imagination one century earlier. During the ascendancy of childhood as innocence, writers and marketers began pairing white children with African Americans, transferring the quality of innocence to them-a dynamic that Bernstein calls "racial innocence." This phenomenon informed racial formation from the mid nineteenth century through the early twentieth, while enabling sharply divergent political agendas-abolition and slavery, enfranchisement and disenfranchisement of African Americans-each to appear, paradoxically, to be innocuous, natural, normal, and therefore justified. Unveiling the ways in which ideas about childhood innocence crucially affected ideas about race, Bernstein reads literary works by consciously political writers (such as Stowe, Joel Chandler Harris, and early Harlem Renaissance playwright Angelina Weld Grimke) against and through racially meaningful material culture, theatrical works, and popular children's fiction that was created by entrepreneurs who aimed more to turn profits than to influence national politics.