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WORK TITLE: Freeman’s Challenge
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PERSONAL
Female.
EDUCATION:Bryn Mawr College, A.B., 1991; University of Maryland, M.A., 1995; George Washington University, M.A., 1999; Yale University, Ph.D., 2004.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Professor and writer. Harvard University, lecturer and assistant director of Program of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality, 2004-06, professor, 2006-, Dillon Professor of American History and professor of African and African American studies, 2016-.
MEMBER:American Antiquarian Society, Harrington Fellowship Society.
AWARDS:New England American Studies Association’s Lois P. Rudnick Book Prize and the Association for Theatre in Higher Education’s Oustanding Book Award, both in 2012, and the Society for the History of Children and Youth’s Grace Abbott Best Book Award, the Children’s Literature Association Book Award, and the International Research Society for Children’s Literature’s IRSCL Prize, all in 2013, all for Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights; PROSE Award for North American/U.S. History, Association of American Publishers, 2025, for Freeman’s Challenge; recipient of numerous awards for individual articles, including the 2014 Darwin T. Turner Award for the essay “Utopian Movements; Nikki Giovanni and the Convocation Following the Virginia Tech Massacre” and the 2021 William Riley Parker Prize for the article “‘You Do It!’: Going-to-Bed Books and the Scripts of Children’s Literature”; recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced study.
WRITINGS
Co-editor of the book series “Performance and American Culture” from New York University Press; contributor of essays and articles to numerous publications, including New York Times, American Literature, Modern Drama, and Chronicle of Higher Education.
SIDELIGHTS
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Robin Bernstein is the Dillon Professor of American History and Professor of African and African American Studies and of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University, where she has taught since 2004. She is a cultural historian who focuses on race and racism, especially in the United States from the nineteenth century to the present. She has won awards for numerous articles and essays she has written that have been published in both academic journals and mainstream publications. The books she has written are more varied than is typical for most authors, especially academics. Her first book, for example, was Terrible, Terrible!: A Folktale Retold, a picture book about a girl who is frustrated by her crowded house and turns to a rabbi for advice.
Bernstein’s first book for adults, Cast Out: Queer Lives in Theater, is a collection of essays and interviews from twenty-two theater professionals, including actors, playwrights, backstage technicians, and critics, as well as passionate fans of the theater. They provide an overview and insight into queer theater history. Bernstein collected and edited the material, and she also wrote introductory material that provides a historical context.
Writing in the Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide, Allen Ellenzweig described the book as “often charming” and particularly highlighted memoirs by Tim Miller, Bree Coven, and Craig Lucas. Ellenzweig also wrote that the collection was “ably introduced and edited by Robin Bernstein.” A reviewer in Internet Bookwatch called it a “welcome and impressive contribution to Gay Studies, Theatre History, and America Popular Culture Studies.”
In Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights, Bernstein argues that the idea of children being innocent is related to how racism has functioned since the mid-nineteenth century. The book makes the case that white children are seen as innocent, whereas Black children are not. Bernstein supports her argument by analyzing how books, toys, and children’s knickknacks have communicated different things about innocence depending on the race of the child. Bernstein also uses her background in theater and literature to analyze theatrical productions and books such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin and The Wizard of Oz.
In CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, T. C. Melancon recommended the book, writing that Bernstein “illuminates . . . the presence and utility of racial childhood innocence in relation to civil rights politics and debates.” Tavia Nyong’o, in Theatre History Studies, praised the book as “impressively researched, cogently written, and deeply theorized.” Nyong’o argued that the book is an important addition to the academic literature on how racial distinctions are propagated, calling it an “important new study.” The book went on to win multiple awards, including the New England American Studies Association’s Lois P. Rudnick Book Prize and the Society for the History of Children and Youth’s Grace Abbott Best Book Award.
For-profit prisons have become more common in the twenty-first century, but they are hardly new. Bernstein’s book Freeman’s Challenge: The Murder That Shook America’s Original Prison for Profit tells the story of one of the first such prisons in the early nineteenth century, where those incarcerated were leased out to private companies for different kinds of work. The prison took the money, and the prisoner earned nothing. Freeman focuses on a Black teenager named William Freeman who was imprisoned there. When he tried to stand up against his treatment, he was beaten, and later he committed a murder that shocked the country. Bernstein compares the prison policies of then to those of today and discusses those in the context of the growing prison abolitionist movement. A writer in Kirkus Reviews called it an “engaging relevant narrative” and a “timely and haunting look at key elements of incarceration history.”
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BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, June, 2012, T. C. Melancon, review of Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights, p. 1854.
Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide, March-April, 2007, Allen Ellenzweig, review of Cast Out: Queer Lives in Theater, p. 44.
Internet Bookwatch, November, 2006, review of Cast Out.
Journal of the History of Sexuality, May, 2010, Laurence Senelick, review of Cast Out.
Kirkus Reviews, November 15, 2024, review of Freeman’s Challenge: The Murder That Shook America’s Original Prison for Profit.
Publishers Weekly, August 31, 1998, review of Terrible, Terrible!: A Folktale Retold, p. 74.
Theatre History Studies, 2015, Tavia Nyong’o, review of Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights, pp. 146+.
ONLINE
Robin Bernstein website, https://www.robinbernsteinphd.com/ (March 12, 2025), author website.
Robin Bernstein’s website at Harvard University, https://scholar.harvard.edu/robinbernstein/home (March 12, 2025), author’s academic website.
Robin Bernstein, Dillon Professor of American History
and Professor of African and African American Studies and of Studies of Women, Gender, & Sexuality, Harvard University
Pronouns: she/her/hers = good enough
rbernst at fas.harvard.edu
Contact
Welcome to my academic website. If you're interested in my public-facing work, please check out my personal website: robinbernsteinphd.com.
I am a cultural historian who specializes in U.S. racial formation from the nineteenth century to the present. A graduate of Yale's doctoral program in American Studies and an elected member of the American Antiquarian Society, I am the Dillon Professor of American History and Professor of African and African American Studies and of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University. Currently the Chair of Harvard's doctoral Program in American Studies, I am also a faculty member in the undergraduate program in Theater, Dance, and Media. With Stephanie Batiste and Brian Herrera, I edit the book series Performance and American Cultures for New York University Press.
My new book is Freeman's Challenge: The Murder that Shook America's Original Prison for Profit. I wrote this book with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Harvard Radcliffe Institute. Click here for praise from Angela Y. Davis, Tiya Miles, Ibram X. Kendi, Heather Ann Thompson, Elizabeth Hinton, Caleb Smith, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.
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My previous book, Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights, won five awards: the Outstanding Book Award from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (co-winner), the Grace Abbott Best Book Award from the Society for the History of Children and Youth, the Book Award from the Children's Literature Association, the Lois P. Rudnick Book Prize from the New England American Studies Association, and the IRSCL Award from the International Research Society for Children's Literature. Racial Innocence was also a runner-up for the American Studies Association's John Hope Franklin Publication Prize and received an Honorable Mention for the Book Award from the Society for the Study of American Women Writers. My other books include the anthology Cast Out: Queer Lives in Theater (University of Michigan Press) and a Jewish feminist children's book titled Terrible, Terrible!
I have published articles on subjects ranging across race, performance, childhood, and US cultural history in PMLA, Social Text, African American Review, American Literature, Theatre Journal, Modern Drama, J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, and many other journals. My article, "'You Do It!': Going-to-Bed Books and the Scripts of Children's Literature," received the 2021 William Riley Parker Prize for an outstanding article in PMLA, and “Utopian Movements: Nikki Giovanni and the Convocation Following the Virginia Tech Massacre” won African American Review’s 2014 Darwin T. Turner Award for “the best essay representing any period in African American or pan-African literature and culture.” My 2009 article "Dances with Things: Material Culture and the Performance of Race," which was published in Social Text, won two prizes: the Outstanding Article award from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education and the Vera Mowry Roberts Award for Research and Publication, given by the American Theatre and Drama Society.
Much of my current work addresses general readers. I recently published the forgotten 1897 slave narrative of Jane Clark, who liberated herself from slavery in Maryland by undergoing an arduous three-year journey that ended in Auburn, New York in 1859. The full text of the narrative (which was penned by a white amanuensis), along with my annotations and an introduction that verifies and contextualizes Jane Clark's story, was published in Commonplace, an online journal of accessible history for lay readers. I also write opinion pieces, including op eds and academic advice. The New York Times published my op ed "Let Black Kids Just Be Kids," and Harvard Magazine published "Being Alive Together: Stephen Sondheim, Omicron, and the Power of Theater." I publish academic advice columns in Chronicle of Higher Education, including "The Art of ‘No,’" "Can You Reverse a Defeatist Habit that Sabotages Your Writing?," "You are Not a Public Utility," "Banish the Smarm: Effective Networking is Sincere, Deep, and Generous," and "How to Talk to Famous Professors."
As a teacher, I have been honored to receive a Harvard College Professorship, which recognizes “particularly distinguished contributions to undergraduate teaching and to creating a positive influence in the culture of teaching in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.” In 2021, I received the Everett Mendelsohn Excellence in Mentoring Award, an honor conferred by the Graduate Student Council at Harvard University.
HOME / PEOPLE /
Robin Bernstein
Dillon Professor of American History and Professor of African and African American Studies and of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality
Director of the Program in American Studies
RobinBernstein
I am a cultural historian who specializes in U.S. racial formation from the nineteenth century to the present. A graduate of Yale's doctoral program American Studies and an elected member of the American Antiquarian Society, I am the Dillon Professor of American History and Professor of African and African American Studies and of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University. Currently the Chair of Harvard's doctoral program in American Studies, I am also a faculty member in the undergraduate program in Theater, Dance, and Media. With Stephanie Batiste and Brian Herrera, I edit the book series Performance and American Cultures for New York University Press.
My new book is Freeman's Challenge: The Murder that Shook America's Original Prison for Profit. I wrote this book with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Harvard Radcliffe Institute. Click here for praise from Angela Y. Davis, Tiya Miles, Ibram X. Kendi, Heather Ann Thompson, Elizabeth Hinton, Caleb Smith, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.
My previous book, Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights, won five awards: the Outstanding Book Award from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (co-winner), the Grace Abbott Best Book Award from the Society for the History of Children and Youth, the Book Award from the Children's Literature Association, the Lois P. Rudnick Book Prize from the New England American Studies Association, and the IRSCL Award from the International Research Society for Children's Literature. Racial Innocence was also a runner-up for the American Studies Association's John Hope Franklin Publication Prize and received an Honorable Mention for the Book Award from the Society for the Study of American Women Writers. My other books include the anthology Cast Out: Queer Lives in Theater (University of Michigan Press) and a Jewish feminist children's book titled Terrible, Terrible!
I have published articles on subjects ranging across race, performance, childhood, and US cultural history in PMLA, Social Text, African American Review, American Literature, Theatre Journal, Modern Drama, J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, and many other journals. My article, "'You Do It!': Going-to-Bed Books and the Scripts of Children's Literature," received the 2021 William Riley Parker Prize for an outstanding article in PMLA, and “Utopian Movements: Nikki Giovanni and the Convocation Following the Virginia Tech Massacre” won African American Review’s 2014 Darwin T. Turner Award for “the best essay representing any period in African American or pan-African literature and culture.” My 2009 article "Dances with Things: Material Culture and the Performance of Race," which was published in Social Text, won two prizes: the Outstanding Article award from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education and the Vera Mowry Roberts Award for Research and Publication, given by the American Theatre and Drama Society.
Mucy of my current work addresses general readers. I recently published the previously unavailable 1897 slave narrative of Jane Clark, who liberated herself from slavery in Maryland by undergoing an arduous three-year journey that ended in Auburn, New York in 1859. The full text of the narrative (which was penned by a white amanuensis), along with my annotations and an introduction that verifies and contextualizes Jane Clark's story, was published in 2018 in the journal Common-Place. I also write opinion pieces, including op eds and academic advice. The New York Times published my op ed "Let Black Kids Just Be Kids" in July 2017. My columns "The Art of ‘No,’" "You are Not a Public Utility," "Banish the Smarm: Effective Networking is Sincere, Deep, and Generous," and "How to Talk to Famous Professors" were published in the Chronicle of Higher Education in 2017.
For the most recent information about my work, please visit my website at https://scholar.harvard.edu/robinbernstein/home
View my CV
Contact Information
Department of African and African American Studies
12 Quincy St.
Cambridge, MA 02138
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rbernst@fas.harvard.edu
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Websites
Robin Bernstein's Personal Website
Robin Bernstein's Academic Website
Robin Bernstein
she/her/hers = good enough
Hello! I’m a cultural historian who specializes in US racial formation since the nineteenth century. I research race through several thematic lenses, including childhood, theatre, and performance studies. A graduate of Yale’s doctoral program in American Studies, I now teach at Harvard in the Department of African and African American Studies and the Program in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality. I also chair Harvard’s doctoral program in American Studies. With Stephanie Batiste and Brian Herrera, I co-edit the NYU Press book series Performance and American Cultures.
My new book, Freeman’s Challenge: The Murder that Shook America’s Original Prison for Profit, was just published by the University of Chicago Press. This book exposes the true origins of profit-driven incarceration—not in the South after the Civil War, as many assume, but instead in the North half a century earlier. I tell this story through the life of one young Afro-Native man named William Freeman. When he was fifteen years old, Freeman was incarcerated in the Auburn State Prison, which was world-famous for innovating the idea that a prison could and should be an economic engine. Forced to work for no pay in prison factories, Freeman rebelled—with effects that reverberate into our own day. See what Angela Y. Davis, Tiya Miles, Ibram X. Kendi, Heather Ann Thompson, Elizabeth Hinton, and Caleb Smith say about Freeman’s Challenge. I wrote this book with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.
My previous book, Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights, won five awards: the Outstanding Book Award from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (co-winner), the Grace Abbott Best Book Award from the Society for the History of Children and Youth, the Book Award from the Children's Literature Association, the Lois P. Rudnick Book Prize from the New England American Studies Association, and the IRSCL Award from the International Research Society for Children's Literature. Racial Innocence was also a runner-up for the American Studies Association's John Hope Franklin Publication Prize and received an Honorable Mention for the Book Award from the Society for the Study of American Women Writers. My other books include the anthology Cast Out: Queer Lives in Theater (University of Michigan Press) and a Jewish feminist children's book titled Terrible, Terrible!
I recently published the forgotten 1897 slave narrative of Jane Clark, who liberated herself from slavery in Maryland by undergoing an arduous three-year journey that ended in Auburn, New York in 1859. The full text of the narrative (which was penned by a white amanuensis), along with my annotations and an introduction that verifies and contextualizes Jane Clark's story, was published in Common-place, an online journal of accessible history for lay readers. I also write opinion pieces, including op-eds and academic advice. The New York Times published my op-ed "Let Black Kids Just Be Kids," and Harvard Magazine published "Being Alive Together: Stephen Sondheim, Omicron, and the Power of Theater." I publish academic advice columns in Chronicle of Higher Education, including "The Art of ‘No,’" "Can You Reverse a Defeatist Habit that Sabotages Your Writing?" "You are Not a Public Utility," "How to Talk to Famous Professors," and "Banish the Smarm: Effective Networking is Sincere, Deep, and Generous."
As a teacher, I have been honored to receive a Harvard College Professorship, which recognizes “particularly distinguished contributions to undergraduate teaching and to creating a positive influence in the culture of teaching in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.” In 2021, I received the Everett Mendelsohn Excellence in Mentoring Award, an honor conferred by the Graduate Student Council at Harvard University.
Bernstein, Robin FREEMAN'S CHALLENGE The University of Chicago Press (NonFiction Nonfiction) $24.06 5, 1 ISBN: 9780226744230
Bernstein, a Harvard University professor and award-winning historian, surveys the origins of the United States' for-profit prisons in this 19th-century case study.
"American prisons are worksites," writes the author in an introduction, noting that they generate billions of dollars in commodities and services based on the labor of underpaid (or unpaid) incarcerated people who "do not have the right to refuse to work." Historians most often trace the origins of such profit-driven labor to the 13th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which banned slavery "except as a punishment for crime"; Bernstein highlights its use more than half a century earlier in an engaging and often infuriating survey of New York's Auburn State Prison. Bernstein notes how the Auburn's founders sought not only to punish criminals, but also to "stimulate economic development" with prison-sponsored factories that produced myriad consumer products, from animal harnesses to carpets. In many ways, the book convincingly argues, Auburn created a framework that continues to shape the country's prison industrial complex, with its inclusion of humiliation rituals (such as a ban on speaking) and its much-imitated black-and-white striped uniform. The book pays particular attention to the case of William Freeman, a Black and Native American young man who was first sentenced to Auburn in 1840when he was 15. Freeman would first defy Auburn's rules by speaking up against its horrific working conditions, and, later, sought revenge through violence in an incident that rocked mid-1800s New York City. The case is a particularly useful study that allows the author to explore the prison's policies and engage with the contemporary prison abolitionist movement. The book's strongest suit is its impressive research, which is backed by nearly 70 pages of endnotes. Bernstein balances her solid understanding of theoretical approaches to American prisons, developed by activist and academic Angela Y. Davis and others, with impressive mining of diaries, letters, newspapers, and other primary sources from the era. The book's engaging, relevant narrative is accompanied by more than three dozen full-color images, including maps, paintings, blueprints, and newspaper clippings.
A timely and haunting look at key elements of incarceration history.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
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"Bernstein, Robin: FREEMAN'S CHALLENGE." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Nov. 2024. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A817943725/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=ded3ba38. Accessed 27 Feb. 2025.
Bernstein, Robin. Racial innocence: performing American childhood and race from slavery to civil rights. New York University, 2011. 307p index afp ISBN 9780814787076, $75.00; ISBN 9780814787083 pbk, $24.00
What is the nexus of childhood innocence, race, representation, performance, and political ideologies? How did these coalesce in the 19th and early 20th centuries in racialized ways that largely justified or contested American slavery, racial apartheid, racism, and the enslavement and disenfranchisement of blacks? And, to what extent do particular images, performances, and literary representations evoking childhood white innocence, as a trope and allegory, socially construct whiteness as holy, pure, good and "normative" while relegating blackness as its diametrical opposite to putatively justify the racial social (dis)order of the era? These and other critical questions punctuate Bernstein's study. Drawing on an array of archival materials, literature, performance, and cultural and material productions (e.g., advertisements, dolls), Bernstein (African and African American studies, Harvard) analyzes the ways each of these strategically and systematically factored into US racial projects to "rationalize" the extension or denial of rights along white-black racial lines. Focusing extensively on the early debates over slavery and abolition and the early Jim Crow era, she also illuminates, though to a lesser extent, the presence and utility of racial childhood innocence in relation to civil rights politics and debates. Summing Up: Recommended. ** Lower- and upper-division undergraduates; graduate students; general readers.--T. C. Melancon, Loyola University
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2012 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Melancon, T.C. "Bernstein, Robin. Racial innocence: performing American childhood and race from slavery to civil rights." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, vol. 49, no. 10, June 2012, p. 1854. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A291615446/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=c7518717. Accessed 27 Feb. 2025.
Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights. By Robin Bernstein. New York: New York University Press, 2011. pp. 318. $24.00 paper.
The enduring popularity of the trope of "internalized racism" in the pedagogy of minority empowerment has always been somewhat paradoxical. The explanatory power of this catchphrase would appear weak. Since racism is targeted at people, how could it be other than internalized, given that it hits its mark? Furthermore, the strategic value of this trope is hard to see, insofar as it redirects attention from the perpetrators of hatred and racism and toward their victims, among whom an invidious distinction is drawn between those who manage to ward off the racist interpellation and those who reenact it upon themselves and all who share their identity. Such a pernicious dualism between good and bad victims of racism would appear counterproductive to any robust psychology of empowerment and liberation. But this has not prevented the dualism from being drawn, as taxonomies of racial self-hatred continue to proliferate in the vernacular.
Robin Bernstein's impressively researched, cogently written, and deeply theorized new book, Racial Innocence, offers one ingenious answer, at least in the case of the U.S. black/white dichotomy, to the popularity of internalized self-hatred as an explanatory model. Turning to the rich archive of childhood as lived, imagined, and performed, she argues that we must turn to a critical genealogy of the concept of childhood innocence to understand the paradoxical appeal of "damage." Children, she reminds us, were not always considered innocent, vulnerable subjects, but (at least within Calvinist orthodoxy) as guilty of original sin. When children began to be reimagined as innocent in romantic and sentimental American culture, their innocence found a privileged figure in the little white girl. It wasn't American childhood as such that became innocent but a specifically raced and gendered childhood. This had important consequences for abolitionist and, later, civil rights activists. Embracing the culture (or was it the cult?) of the child, antiracists sought to extend this privilege of innocence to black boys and girls, in part by demonstrating their equal capacity to suffer.
But, as Bernstein shows with depressingly exhaustive evidence, the culture of white supremacy inculcated an ideology of black insensateness, contrasting with white sensibility. White supremacy excused performed and real violence against black bodies because of their allegedly greater capacity to endure pain and be obliviously happy. Pedagogies of childhood play--evidence of which Bernstein finds in novels, memoirs, illustrations, playbills, figurines, songsheets, photographs, and dolls, to sample just some of the range of her evidence--reinforced this white supremacist dichotomy between white fragility and black obdurateness. Harriet Beecher Stowe, who sought to demonstrate the damage slavery did to black children through her character Topsy, found that her own creation became one of the most enduring sites for the reproduction in performance of the mythically insensate black child. Harmless, innocent fun (as evidenced in an astonishing chapter on the minstrel roots of Raggedy Ann and Andy) became a disavowed site for the reproduction of white supremacy.
Elements of this argument have been outlined in the literature, for instance in Saidiya Hartman's influential Scenes of Subjection (1997). What Bernstein contributes is a novel methodology for interpreting the archival record for its performances, or "scripts" as she calls them. Her chosen term is deliberately situated between the historical/textual and the embodied/live. It draws upon performance studies, thing theory, material culture, visual culture, and literary analysis to propose that objects in the archive leave evidence as to how they "want" to be used. That is, much as a playscript inclines the performance derived from it toward particular ends, even if a particular staging is revisionist or resistant toward those ends, things possess "scripts" that direct their users toward forms of model behavior. These directions can be derived both from their contexts (descriptions and prescriptions of their uses) and a close analysis of the things themselves. Much of the book is engaged in tracking these everyday scripts of childhood: crying, cuddling, laughing; touching, breaking, beating; playing, learning, resisting. These quotidian activities are not often seen as related to the larger political story of slavery and freedom, segregation and its overthrow. Racial Innocence reveals to us what an oversight we have made. In the process, it makes an understated but highly persuasive case for the contribution of a historically oriented performance studies to the interdisciplinary conversations surrounding the politics of the everyday.
Racial Innocence thus convincingly intervenes in debates over narratives of psychological harm. Its arc is long, with the greater weight in the nineteenth century. But, at least for this reader, its political dividends pay off in the final chapter devoted to the use of dolls in the child studies of the black psychologists Mamie and Kenneth Clark, begun in the 1930s. These doll studies are very widely known for their contributing role in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education U.S. Supreme Court decision overturning segregation in public schools. The Clarks' demonstration, through the doll play of black children, that a color hierarchy of white over black had already been "internalized" by their youthful subjects, became an enduring script in American pop psychology. As Bernstein notes, "The Clarks implanted in American common sense the belief, which remains prominent today, that any black child who prefers white dolls is necessarily showing symptoms of individual and societal pathology: internalized racism" (197).
Racial Innocence makes two important contributions to the ongoing assessment of the Clarks' legacy for black liberation and empowerment. First, through her genealogy of racial innocence, Bernstein untangles the paradox as to why the emphasis upon black susceptibility to damage was so strong at the time, and why it overruled any concern that such models might reinscribe belief in black inferiority or sustain a reductionist ego psychology. And second, she demonstrates a historical method that, while valuing the Clarks' strategy, preserves historical evidence of the agency and resistance of black children's doll play, within and against the Clarks' intentions and interpretations. By centering the scriptive thing, Bernstein enhances our ability to read both with and against its grain. This is, perhaps, another paradox that the book leaves us with, one more performative than psychological. But it is a more theoretically productive one than the now exhausted model of "internalized racism," and for that reason alone we ought to make room on our shelves and syllabi for this important new study.
TAVIA NYONG'O
New York University
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2015 The University of Alabama Press
http://www.uapress.ua.edu/NewSearch2.cfm?id=136126
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Nyong'o, Tavia. "Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights." Theatre History Studies, vol. 34, annual 2015, pp. 146+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A439362808/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=c6cdf8e5. Accessed 27 Feb. 2025.
Cast Out: Queer Lives in Theater
Edited by Robin Bernstein
Univ. of Michigan Press. 248 pages, 22.95
This collection of personal essays, interviews, and polemics, ably introduced and edited by Robin Bernstein, explores "queer theater history" from early inquiries into same-sex eroticism "on and off stage in ancient Greece and Rome" through scholarship that matches the texts and lives of Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe. Starting in the 1920's, anti-establishment theatre comprised of sexual bohemians (the Provincetown and Washington Square Players) laid some patchy same-sex groundwork, until we finally arrive on the threshold of a fully self-conscious gay manner, if not quite subject matter, in coded works by Tennessee Williams and Edward Albee, and in the musical scores of Stephen Sondheim. The Beats and hippie counterculture begot the underground theatre movement, especially the Caffe Cino in New York City, a breeding ground for gay plays by Lanford Wilson, William Hoffman, and Robert Patrick--and Charles Ludlam's frankly camp Ridiculous Theater Company. These, in tandem with 1968's seminal Boys in the Band, by Mart Crowley--and the masterful performance piece that was the Stonewall Riots--broke things wide open. Ellen Stewart's La MaMa Experimental Theater Club hosted works by Maria Irene Fornes, transgendered Ethyl Eichelberger, and Jean-Claude van Italie. Lois Weaver and Peggy Shaw collaborated on WOW (Women's One World), an international women's theater festival, which mutated into the permanent theater space, the WOW Cafe, where Holly Hughes and Five Lesbian Brothers performed and from which the troupe Split Britches--"a sexy, campy centering of butch-femme identities and cultures"--emerged. Then, alas, came AIDS and its theatrical cri de coeur. Several personal memoirs stand out: Tim Miller offers an eyewitness view of the culture wars from the center of the tornado; Bree Coven maps her coming out in the theatre world with wry humor and some regret; Craig Lucas details the psychic pains of writing his dramatic truth amid the compromising blandishments of the marketplace, and the need to make common cause with others beyond the queer community. On balance, this is a sometimes maddening, often charming, occasionally slight series of essays and reminiscences.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2007 The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide
http://glreview.org
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Ellenzweig, Allen. "Cast Out: Queer Lives in Theater." The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide, vol. 14, no. 2, Mar.-Apr. 2007, p. 44. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A160632395/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=6974ff42. Accessed 27 Feb. 2025.
Cast Out: Queer Lives in the Theater. Edited by ROBIN BERNSTEIN. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006. Pp. 232. $22.95 (paper).
Cast Out is a miscellany of pieces by persons connected in one way or another with queer, gay, or transsexual theater over the past couple of decades. Their statements provide "personal accounts and documents of galvanizing queer communities through theatre" (12). The unifying theme seems to be the interwoven nature of an individual's life and art: the queerness of one's being is enacted in performance, while the queerness of the performance is guaranteed by the predilections and personality of the artist. The contradictions that run like fissures through this concept surface in the title, The tortuous pun is meant to suggest that the performers and playwrights in this collection garner play roles that proudly announce their homosexuality and express their selfhood in their onstage personae. At the same time there is the inevitable connotation of outcast or pariah, perpetuating the notion of the sexually unorthodox as a marginal victim. As the blurb puts it, this latter distinction "dispel[s] the cliche of theater as a 'safe haven"' (back matter).
Similar ambivalences can also be discerned in the foreword by Jill Dolan and the introduction by the editor, Robin Bernstein. Both academics, Dolan and Bernstein are keenly aware of the glut of theorizing about gender and performance that has circulated for the past twenty-five years and tread their way carefully through the minefield of contested claims. Although Dolan's piece is chiefly autobiographical, mostly about her early forays into theater, she is cautious not to dismiss the scholarly debate as irrelevant to the act of performance. Her empirical experience leads her to distrust blanket statements, but even she is haunted by the need to be politically correct. For instance, mentioning a play about tolerance she wrote in school, she regrets: "I'm ashamed to recall that my friend wore dark makeup to approximate the African American girl's skin color," for this "implicated [me] in racist blackface performance traditions" (vi). There is a kind of historical myopia here, an inability to recognize the value and significance of those same traditions, no matter how repugnant to current prejudices.
Still, Dolan is clear-sighted enough to state, if only in a note, that "although the notion of presence has fallen into disrepute under postmodernist and feminist theorizing, I remain attached to the charisma of the performer as a potentially transformative, political experience in performance" (xii, n3). Certain ineffable qualities (some of which--glamour, charisma, good timing--Joseph Roach has recently discussed in his study of "It") elude analysis. (1) Dolan refuses to intellectualize away the erotic element: "At the theater, I learned about desire. The playhouse created around me a protective sphere" (vii). This sentiment is echoed by Bernstein, who relates that the influential lesbian group Split Britches came into being when Lois Weaver and Peggy Shaw, members of separate troupes, met and fell in love (5). The following essays regularly trace the intersection of sex and theater, although one wishes there were more on the audience's projection of desire onto the performer.
For Bernstein, this erotic bond is the crux in defining the term queer in relation to theater people. She is dissatisfied with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's use of queer as an umbrella term for off-beat and prefers to preserve a vision of multiplicity: diversity, difference, and disagreement. Bernstein also rejects the two main narratives in recent writing on queerness: one traces "a progressive evolution towards a jubilantly queer or a disenchantedly postgay present. The second centers and analyzes the production and flow of meanings, identities and practices of daily life" (12). Both represent an antiessentialism that suggests that "queerness is available--equally available--to all. ... This democratization of queerness can sever, or at least trivialize, historical connections between the idea of 'queerness' and the bodies of people who relate erotically to members of the same sex" (15). Bernstein therefore prefers to reclaim "queerness" for what is usually termed the LGBT community.
Most of the practitioners who contribute to this volume appear blithely unaware of the ongoing academic discourse. Peggy Shaw is perfectly pragmatic in her approach: "Doing non-traditional theatre you have to do something to wake up the audience, something more exciting" (28). Some are sufficiently aware of cultural studies to feel oppressed by them. MilDred Diyaa Gerestant is eager to deny that her drag long performance creates "a connection between masculinity and misogyny. I don't want to be chauvinistic. Playing a 'pimp daddy' I change it so it isn't sexist or misogynist" (47). Since pimps by definition exploit women and drag kings by definition expose the most blatantly "macho" aspects of masculinity, one would like to know how Gerestant achieves this purpose, but the details are left vague.
Familiarity with the debates on gender and queerness can breed eon-tempt among those whose work is scrutinized under the academic lens. The influential lesbian Chicana performer Cherrie L. Moraga mocks fashionable cultural critic Peggy Phelan as "the Hot Commodity" and resents being patronized by an outsider who claims analytic authority over Moraga's creations (79). The transsexual Kate Bornstein, who once proselytized for gender shifting and androgyny as a means of attaining supernatural status, now states: "I got tired of gender-as-simply-identity. I'm a lot more interested these days in the nature of identity itself, and how identities ... shift within relationships" (104). The move away from solipsism to interaction is intriguing. As to clarifying the queerness of the theater, the playwright Ricardo Bracho dissolves all distinctions when he says: "Everyone in theater is gay. Theater culture in itself is so gay--witty, ironic, self-referential" (13), terms that in the past have been used to define "camp."
The pieces that make up this anthology fall into three categories: the confessional memoir, the harangue, and the interview. The interviews are the least successful, perhaps because the interviewers are too respectful of their subjects and fail to ask probing questions, especially about craft. The Paris Review this isn't. Andrew Velez on George C. Wolfe and Cherry Jones and Robin Bernstein on Edward Albee are the weakest in this regard. Bernstein in particular fails to challenge Albee on the career narrative that he has shaped into a regularly repeated party piece over the past decade. The problem with the memoir is its partiality. Anecdotal and subjective by nature, it cannot give the reader an overarching view of its author's achievements. If one has not seen a particular performance or read the work of a particular playwright, it is hard to reconstruct them from these fugitive comments. This makes the book somewhat hermetic to those who have not closely followed the evolution of queer performance and may leave the absolute beginner baffled. The memoir also has a tendency to shade into the harangue, as in Tim Miller's complaints about the U.S. government's refusal to allow his Australian lover to settle in this country or Robert Patrick's indignation that the Gaffe Cino has been erased from American theater history (a situation that, as an editorial note indicates, has been remedied by a number of recent books). Incidentally, Patrick himself proves an unreliable historian when he states that the aftermath of the Oscar Wilde affair "for the first time in history instituted the ideal of real men as brutish, stupid, and coarse" (171). So much for London's Jacobean "roaring boys" and Hanoverian "Mohocks"!
The most carefully wrought pieces resemble works of short fiction, familiar coming-out stories, such as Jim Provenzano's account of making it with a hunky tech director at a summer theater (this belongs to a genre that should be named, after an outstanding example, "I Love You, but the Season's Over"), The best written, oddly enough, is by Novid Parsi, who is described in the list of contributors simply as "lives in Chicago" (230). Parsi, as one deduces from his memoir, is not an actor or a playwright, yet his polished account of East Texas high school dramatics and his fixation on the boy who was to become the movie star Matthew McConaughey is the most sophisticated disquisition on difference in the collection. For all its self-involvement, it is also the easiest to extrapolate beyond its narrator's experience.
Amidst all the academic concern with questions of gender identity, sexual liberation, and queer theory, a very old-fashioned notion keeps recurring: the magic of the theater. Kate Bornstein introduces the untrendy point that one can distinguish between good and bad performers by their efficacy in making people's dreams come true: "It's all a performance ... it's all an act. ... Rut really good acting? Really good whoring? That's the magic part" (109). The actor Michael Kearns has no qualms about voicing the commonplace uttered by every drama teacher: "I believe the theater provides us with something intrinsically magical that no film or television show can capture" (209). And even Jill Dolan confesses that what seduced her about the theater was "the magic I wanted to learn how to create, the magic I loved watching, the magic that seduced me with what it carefully constructed and the labor of artistry it hid from view" (viii).
(1) Joseph Roach, It (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007).
LAURENCE SENELICK
Tufts University
Senelick, Laurence
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2010 University of Texas at Austin (University of Texas Press)
http://www.utexas.edu/utpress
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Senelick, Laurence. "Cast Out: Queer Lives in the Theater." Journal of the History of Sexuality, vol. 19, no. 2, May 2010, pp. 340+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A228138052/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=6cc4d404. Accessed 27 Feb. 2025.
Cast Out
Robin Bernstein, editor
University of Michigan Press
839 Greene Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48104-3209
0472069330, $22.95 www.press.umich.edu 1-734-764-4388
Compiled and edited by academician Robin Bernstein (who teaches in the Program of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University), "Cast Out" is a collection drawn from memoirs and interviews by twenty-two leading performers, playwrights, technicians, producers, critics, educators, and influential spectators of theatre over the past half-century. The focus is on the experience and perception of homosexuality in life theatre with the expert and personal contributions of Edward Albee, Kate Bornstein, Richard Bracho, Bree Coven, Terry Galloway, Cherry Jones, Lisa Kron, Craig Lucas, Tim Miller, Cherrie Moraga, Jim Provenzano, Peggy Shaw, George C. Wolfe and so many others. The result is an impressive and seminal contribution to the art, creativity, and social changes of American theatre over the past five decades with respect to the gay community. "Cast Out" is a welcome and impressive contribution to Gay Studies, Theatre History, and America Popular Culture Studies reference collections and supplemental reading lists.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2006 Midwest Book Review
http://www.midwestbookreview.com
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"Cass Out." Internet Bookwatch, Nov. 2006. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A157592069/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=7d477bf8. Accessed 27 Feb. 2025.
Robin Bernstein, illus. by Shauna Mooney Kawasaki. Kar-Ben, $15.95 (32p) ISBN 1-58013-016-X; $6.95 paper -017-8
With only limited success, Bernstein updates the classic Yiddish folktale so superbly told in Margot Zemach's It Could Always Be Worse. In this version, an only child objects to cramped quarters after her mother marries a man with four children. Acting on the advice Abigail has solicited from the rabbi (a woman), the family starts storing all their bicycles in the house. When Abigail reports back the next day, telling the rabbi that things are "terrible, terrible, worse than before," the rabbi has the girl bring the family pets inside; after that, she asks the family to invite their "dozens of cousins" for an indefinite stay. Finally, when everyone and everything moves back out, the house feels roomy enough. The setup is contemporary, but Abigail's speech might as well be issued by a shtetl-dweller: "I can't lift my hand to wipe away my tears.... The walls moan, the floors groan, and I'm scared the beams will split." What begins as folktale devolves into slapstick, especially as the cousins march in (on "a th ousand stomping feet"), and, as the humor stretches, the impact withers. The art doesn't help: garishly colored cartoons portray the family in histrionic poses, the theatrical effect exacerbated by the unchanging perspective in which everyone faces the viewer. In all the shtick, ordinary human feelings get crowded out. All ages. (Sept.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1998 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
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"TERRIBLE, TERRIBLE!" Publishers Weekly, vol. 245, no. 35, 31 Aug. 1998, p. 74. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A21096457/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=e8227504. Accessed 27 Feb. 2025.